


The Vast Abrupt & Other Stories

by etirabys



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Dom/sub Undertones, F/F, F/M, Female Harry Potter, Female Severus Snape, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:34:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25910647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etirabys/pseuds/etirabys
Summary: Collection of abandoned Snarry projects with plot for unwritten parts sketched in, one fic per chapter. About a third of these fics will be f/f genderbend.Ch 1: The summer before Severin Snape starts her final year of school, her mother takes in a lodger. She's beautiful. She's interesting. And she might be an ideal person to induct Severin into her sexuality, if she weren't a time-traveler with scars and secrets of her own.Ch 4: It's a painful thing to know in your mid twenties that all the defining events of your life lie in the past. When Snape stumbles into a another universe where his older self is engaged to Harry Potter, he discovers that it can be even more challenging to know that there are major turns left yet in his life, ones that could make him very happy – if he has to courage to accept being ridiculous, being open, being changed.Snape leaned forward and kissed him. Harry's mouth parted a little in pure shock, and became one half of a seal. Snape's mouth was acrid. He was a horrible kisser, clumsy and aggressive.Harry kissed him back. He never hesitated."That wasn't," Snape murmured, drunken confusion. "That's not what I expected you to –"
Relationships: Harry Potter/Severus Snape
Comments: 6
Kudos: 31





	1. The Tiger and the Gallow Tree

**Author's Note:**

> Directory: (author's favorites are in bold)
> 
>  **Chapter 1** (13K, f/f) The summer before Severin Snape starts her final year of school, her mother takes in a lodger. She's beautiful. She's interesting. And she might be an ideal person to induct Severin into her sexuality, if she weren't a time-traveler with scars and secrets of her own.
> 
> Chapter 2 (1.5K, m/m) Sketch of a fic where Snape is stripped of his magic after the war, and meets Harry at a Muggle university while pursuing a computer engineering degree.
> 
> Chapter 3 (3K, f/f) Harriet Potter comes out in her fourth year, causing great disruption in the social fabric of Hogwarts. Snape, who’s also a lesbian but to whom it never occurred to come out, who is rarely considered a sexual being by anybody, finds herself obscurely furious. She doesn’t work through her real feelings for like a year – Harry’s getting all the self-actualization stuff that Snape never could have, that Snape never even knew she wanted.
> 
>  **Chapter 4** (6.5K, m/m) It's a painful thing to know in your mid twenties that all the defining events of your life lie in the past. When Snape stumbles into a another universe where his older self is engaged to Harry Potter, he discovers that it can be even more challenging to know that there are major turns left yet in his life, ones that could make him very happy – if he has to courage to accept being ridiculous, being open, being changed.
> 
>  **Chapter 5** (5K, m/m) Prequel to Some Secret Tree (Ch 4). In the last years of the war, Snape finds a new master.

The summer preceding Severin's final year at Hogwarts, her mother took in a lodger named Harriet Dunting. Eileen had sent Severin a letter about it three weeks before the school year ended, but Severin had other things to think about: doing her part to keep Gryffindor from winning the House Cup, her final exams, the alternatingly petty and genuinely dangerous politicking in her House among the initiated, and the extracurricular brewing she was doing for the Dark Lord that had to be shipped out of the school by subtle means. The prospect of a lodger – Severin couldn't even tell from the letter if she was a witch – only made a dent in her consciousness because the room being cleared for her had previously been occupied by potion supplies and gear.

Severin arrived home by a series of Muggle buses, dawdling to buy some cheese and fruit at a market in an intermediate town, and arrived deliberately past her mother's bedtime. She did not see anyone until the morning.

The lodger was sitting at the kitchen table, cupping a mug of tea, when Severin came down for breakfast. Severin halted, surprised. She'd expected someone middle-aged and frumpy, possibly a Muggle. Harriet was none of those things. She was sitting in the sun: the light hit the vapor coming off her drink, which was directed in an unnaturally steady stream terminating at her nose. Severin had seen the spell used before by people appreciating particularly fragrant teas. She looked to be in her early or mid twenties, and had a pureblood fineness to her jaw that reminded Severin of Potter or the Hufflepuff Chaser, Viv Malluf. Her loose white shirt was Muggle, and unfairly flattering to her collarbones. 

Severin was suddenly aware of her palms, of the gentle breeze coming up the stairwell and playing across them, blown from the window and setting a curl on the woman's forehead dancing. A jolt seemed to run through Severin's body.

"You must be..." Dunting said slowly. The steam wavered. Her eyes were fixed with an uncomfortable intensity on Severin's face. Severin, who hated being stared at by beautiful people, set her jaw and fixed her gaze fiercely back. "Eileen's daughter."

Almost no one called Severin's mother Eileen. "Good morning," Severin said coolly. "And you're the lodger."

"You can call me Harry."

"I'm Severin Snape," she said. "The cheese and figs in the pantry are mine, and you're not to touch them."

Dunting's mouth went sardonic. Severin stared hard at it, making herself prickly against Dunting's dislike so that she could bear being around her. After the year she'd had, not speaking to Lily but unable to spend most of her mental energies being aware of her when they were in the same room, Severin was in no mood to slaver over a beautiful woman.

"Feel free to it," said Dunting. "I don't take food from the kitchen that's not mine, although your mother's agreed to give me a shelf at the bottom for my own supplies."

Severin spelled a bowl of porride hot, made herself some eggs, and fled back to her room with her tray. Her potions kit was on her desk, which she'd forgotten, and needed to move before she could sit down to eat. The kit was in her room because the well-ventilated second floor room that had been her storage and brewing room for the past five years now belonged to the lodger. She moved vials and containers and jars with annoyed precision: she would have to renovate the shed for the purpose. And because the shed was outdoors, she could not use magic overtly to transport everything. She may be permitted to use it, but there were still restrictions on public use in Muggletown. The rules were designed for the stupidest clumsiest students who couldn't managed a good notice-me-not or a confounding spell.

On the way out, physically lugging her things, Severin ran into her mother. She could not avoid saying hello. "Hello," she said, hefting her supplies higher, so that the box at the top bumped up over her chin.

"Good morning," said Eileen. She seemed, every time, older and more tired than the last time Severin had seen her. At forty, she looked a Muggle forty. Severin knew classmates' mothers who looked half the age. Two years ago, Eileen had dropped off Severin at the station to catch the express to Hogwarts. Leticia Parkinson had caught up with her in the compartment half an hour later, gleefully inquiring whether that had been Severin's _grandmother_.

They stared at each other for a second before Eileen, visibly pushing through hesitation, said, "And how was school?"

Severin's six-month-old tattoo prickled warmly on the inside of her arm: her guarantee that she would become more than her mother, more than this house, than this drab town. "Good. My exams went fine. We won the House Cup."

Eileen nodded vaguely. Severin got the sense that she would have given the vague nod to whatever Severin said. She abruptly couldn't stand it anymore: she said, "These are heavy, I've got to get them to the shed. I'm making it my brewing room."

"Ah." Eileen's brows pulled together. "Yes, since Harry's taking the room. Severin, you're to be civil to her. She's paying quite a lot, we need the money."

Severin hesitated, arms aching. "Why is she paying a lot to stay _here_?"

"I'm not sure, but she's a witch, polite, not a drunk. Maybe she's foreign. I'm not going to get in her business, and neither are you."

"Fine," Severin said shortly, and finally jerked into motion away of the conversation.

Setting up the shed to be an acceptable Potions lab was a day-long chore. She fiddled around with ventilation, security, illusioning, and internal surfaces. Everything that had originally been in the shed she took outside, covered with a tarp, and turned invisible.

...

She spent the next few weeks avoiding everyone. She received more mail than she had in any previous summer: since her initiation, and the Dark Lord's acceptance of her skills as a potioneer, Death Eaters all over Britain had started routing minor requests towards her.

Although it meant a lot of work for no payment except for what covered the materials, it was a pleasurable change from the last summer, when she'd spent much of her time reading magic textbooks, and, tired of reading the magic textbooks, roamed hopefully throughout town, alternatingly hopeful and terrified of seeing Lily. She hadn't seen Lily. Later she found that Lily had spent most of the summer with Alice Longbottom, in the Longbottom estate in Scotland.

A pang. No one was inviting Severin to ancient pureblood estates. No one should have invited Lily, either – it was only because the Longbottoms were Muggle-lovers.

...

Severin bent her head up after swinging in the last bag of groceries. In the kitchen was her father. She hadn't seen him in almost two years. Muscles all along her upper body seemed to lock up, as if in extreme cold. He was holding some withered flowers, and his shoes were dirty. He was shorter than she remembered – the same height as hers, or perhaps even a little shorter. Over the years, she'd thought of so many hexes and curses she could land on him if she saw him again, if he gave her an excuse. She couldn't remember a single one of them.

He looked painfully like her. She saw, unwillingly and with an unpleasant twist in her chest, that when she was older she would look like this man – this Muggle.

"Severin," he said, startled.

"What are you doing here?" She didn't like how the words came out – brittle, maybe frightened-seeming. She was not frightened. She was furious.

[Her father is back, two weeks into break; he's run out of money, turned out by his friend he'd been staying with, lost his job. Drunk. His shoes were dirty.]

"You have a spare room, Eileen, I'm not asking to share. I know our girl likes to stack her plants and... kits inside, but she doesn't need all of it, does she?" 

Severin, outside on the steps, put her arms around her legs and hunched over to stare at the cracked concrete between her feet. Tobias only called her 'our girl' when he was trying to wheedle Eileen into something. Why he thought that would help him, she didn't know. She was the ugly and interminable product of an ugly, and it seemed internminable, union. She wished he would leave so badly that her palms itched.

"It's in use." Her mother's voice was clipped. "By someone else. I'm renting it out."

"To whom? Jesus, Eileen. A woman alone and her daughter –"

"It's a woman, Tobias."

Her father sounded a little mollified. "Well, that means you still have the..."

A shadow fell over the ground in front of Severin's feet. The lodger stood in front of the door, holding a bulging paper bag from the Muggle grocer. Her wand was in a holster whose straps encircled the muscled taper of her left thigh, and shimmered with a light concealment charm that Muggles wouldn't see through but Severin could. Severin let her gaze linger a bit, letting the woman think that it was the holster that caught her attention.

"Afternoon," said Dunting. "Mind if I go in?"

Severin did not want her to. She discovered that she cared about protecting her parents' dignity from this stranger, even if they'd traded it away. "If you wouldn't mind holding off a bit," she said stiffly. "My mother is in the middle of something."

"Oh?" Dunting looked like she was in the middle of constructing a more probing question.

"Go take a walk around the block or something," Severin snarled. "It doesn't concern you."

A fine brow arched. "Well, I _am_ paying for –"

Inside, Eileen yelped. Severin's skin went cold, and she felt her fingernails dig into her palms. That was fucking fast. She hated them both so much. She looked up when she heard a sound from in front of her – Dunting's groceries hitting the ground as she whipped out her wand and, before Severin could move, barged in through the door, which flew open for her.

Severin jumped to her feet, pulling out her own wand without thinking. When she rushed after Dunting into the kitchen, her father was pinned to the wall as if by an invisible hand. His feet were kicking.

Dunting said, "Who's this?"

Severin looked at her mother, challenging her to explain. Eileen was not looking at anyone in particular. It was amazing to Severin that she'd never seen her mother pull her wand on Tobias. Or use her wand around Tobias at all. Severin stared at her angrily: _See? It can be done. You can do it too, if this random witch can._

"This is Severin's father," Eileen said in a dusty, careful way that was unfamiliar to Severin. And enraging. _Her_ father? Eileen was the one who had fucking married him. "He was visiting."

Harry looked at the man with mild interest, but Severin got the impression she wasn't surprised. The resemblance, probably. "Well, does it seem time for him to be off?"

Being talked about like that enraged Tobias. His face flushed as deeply as Severin had ever seen it. Eileen seemed alarmed by seeing the tension in his body building up against magic that bound him against her cracked plaster wall. Her gaze swung towards Severin. "Leave the house for a bit, Severin."

As if she were ELEVEN. She felt herself flush, too, and hated it because she knew how much she looked like her father when she did. She opened her mouth, but Harry cut her to it. "And go where?" she said, with surprising fierceness. "She lives here, he doesn't. Why should she have to leave?"

Severin veered on a dime. She didn't want to stay here anyway, and having the stranger side with her was uncomfortable. Her skin prickled with awkwardness and distrust. "I'll go," she said coldly, and backed out of the room. Her father's black eyes followed her with a strange desperation. As if SHE would be on his side.

Aimlessly, she wandered up to the corner store three blocks away where, once, her father had sent her to get cigarettes. It was in the direction of Lily's house. To her annoyance, she kept composing what she'd say to Lily if she ran into her. Maybe she wouldn't. Maybe Lily was with the Longbottoms again, being effortlessly inducted into a pureblood world that Severin had to fight, fangs out, to access.

But she did not run into Lily. 

"You're a good girl, Severin, putting in that money and food for Mrs. Staller when she was sick," said the old woman at the checkout counter. Severin could never remember her name.

Severin frowned reflexively. It had been two years ago, and it hadn't been a lot of help. It was Mrs. Staller, who had cared for Severin for almost two weeks one of the times Eileen had entrusted Severin to the local church while she sorted out her problems with Tobias or the house. She had been kind. Severin owed her. The way these people kept remembering that kind of thing was strange, always put her off balance. "Thank you," she said stiltedly. She could not find a way to say to this Muggle, it was obligation and not kindness.

"And how's your mother?"

"She's well."

"Good, good. The Spain trip did her well."

She had no idea what to say to that either. It confused her that the woman even knew about it. Severin certainly never spoke about her family's business to the Muggles of Cokeworth, and if they knew, it meant that Eileen did. And that was the oddest thing of all, that her closed-off mother discussed personal business with these people. She mumbled something polite and fled with her purchase.

Her father left her mother during the winter of Severin's second year. She didn't come home that Christmas – her mother told her not to. When Severin returned that summer, he was gone. She received little explanation from her mother, who was ghostly and distracted, and told Severin a week in that they were going to Spain for the summer holidays. Severin didn't want to go. She kicked up a fuss and dug in her heels and made her mother cry, multiple times, during the three weeks abroad. Twice, she got slapped. They stayed in wizarding inns with bad soundproofing spells, and they both got unpleasantly sunburnt.

The memory was so painful that Severin felt singed by it when she unsubmerged it. She resented the woman at the counter for bringing it up.

She'd missed her father that summer. His rages were terrifying, and he'd hit her more than once, but he could be good-natured, more than her mother ever was. On his good days he'd take her out for adventures. He'd buy her ice cream and indulge her when she dragged him into bookstores, even though her desire for books clearly puzzled him.

Her chest hurt badly. She walked circles around her home for half an hour before reluctantly going back in.

The house was silent. She checked the kitchen: no sign of her father. Things had gotten resolved without her. She could stop caring about this.

She climbed the stairs and was about to turn left towards her room when she heard a familiar and unwelcome sound: her mother moaning in her room. Eileen, if she masturbated, was always silent. But she cried out like that when Severin's father was back in the house. It preceded, or punctuated, fighting. Noise never carried in the Malfoy house like this. Severin's jaw clenched as her steps, pathologically, halted, so that she could hear her father's unpleasant, low grunting, and the squeaking of the springs. 

But there wasn't any grunting, or oscillating metal – instead, there was a sweet female murmur, terminated in a laugh. Severin felt her eyeslids strain as they widened abruptly. It was unmistakeably the lodger's voice.

Severin bolted into her room, followed by another moan, stifled but even louder than the laugh, from her mother. Her heart pounded and she stared wildly over her desk, her suitcase, her books, trying to orient herself in her life again.

:::

Weeks ground by. [Severin keeps to her room as much as possible]

When the letter came, it was unmarked, but the bearer was a regal, narrow owl whose flight feathers were dappled with silver, almost as finely bred as its sender. Severin hid her eagerness as she took the letter and opened it. It was covered with spidery nonsense glyphs. Severin stared a bit, ordering her best guesses, and started casting decoder charms.

The glyphs wobbled and reconnected, and finally cohered into words when she tried a decoder that Rab Lestrange had taught her a year ago. It was appallingly insecure for him to use the same decoder keyword, but she decided let it go – he was senior to her in the ranks.

In the elegant, sparse scrawl that all purebloods seemed to have learned in childhood:

Raid on Osborne household and surrounding Muggle town, June 29th 8pm  
Meet half an hour prior at Apparation location half a mile north of Brunden Square, [city]  
Self destruct in...

The last line had brightened from black to a dark red by the time she finished reading it. She reread it, committing it to memory. When the final letters turned red, the parchment it was written on was, abruptly, ash.

Severin wiped the ash off her hands and thought.

It was obvious why the Osbornes were a target: Petra Osborne, a former Slytherin and a current Ministry employee, had turned down the Dark Lord with finality a few months ago. Severin remembered her younger sister, currently in her second year and also in Slytherin, being a pressure point through the year. Petra had not given in.

But there would have been a different summons if the Dark Lord had wanted this done. Lestrange held the kind of position where something like this might be in his discretion – but perhaps not. The Osbornes were a big target. And the raid date was four days in the future – the Dark Lord usually didn't plan things on that short a notice.

But Severin had never been invited on a raid before. And she wanted to go. And her safety from the Dark Lord's wrath lay in her ignorance of whether Lestrange's raid had approval. So she had to cultivate that ignorance.

Satisfied with her decision, she [moved on with her day]

[Flashback of the recruiting talk in a Slytherin back room]

And then Malfoy brought it down, linking this grand dream to specific circumstances like the Muggle-loving factions being in control of the Ministry and Wizengamot and Auror program – a government, it was rumored, that the Dark Lord intended to overthrow by force if the old pureblooded parties were not placated. Malfoy never spoke about overthrowing the government. He skirted smoothly around it, and its absence drew attention to it. Nothing he said was seditious, but every Slytherin with half a brain understood that the conspiracy they were being invited into _was_ : that this was a call to arms for nothing less than revolution.

And Malfoy was a very appealing revolutionary. Severin had to admit that, even though he was a man. He was narrow and blonde and sharp in a way Severin wasn't unaffected by, although the effect was hardly lust. He was too cleanly dressed, too confident, too wealthy, for Severin to interact with without awkwardness and some distrust.

(Lily, although from a better part of town, had never been one of the clean wealthy elegants who intimidated Severin. They had more in common in Hogwarts than they did in Cokeworth, and this had kept them together for years. More years than they should have. And now Lily looked like one of the wealthy elegants, as confident and easy of a witch as any of the pureblood Gryffindors: she knew what robes to dress in to her advantage, she knew how to riff on jokes about the one book every pureblood had read when they were nine. Which wasn't fair. Severin didn't know how to do that. How could Lily pick it up so well?)

When Malfoy finished and left, the fifth and sixth years trickled out in their twos and threes and fours. Severin remained behind: she usually left before or after a crowd, to make it less obvious that she wasn't accompanied by someone.

"You are joining, right?"

It was Rab Lestrange. His eyes were a warm, dark brown. He was bossy and made fun of her, but Severin sensed it was never really mean, it was something he did to everyone because he could.

"I'm not unconvinced," Severin said coolly. "But it remains to be seen if Malfoy's dream has anything for me."

Rab said, "It's not Malfoy's dream, it's the Dark Lord's. And he wants you. I told him about your potions."

Severin's heart seemed to stutter. "You did?"

"He was intrigued. He wants you to come to the next initiation during the holidays. He told me specifically to get you there."

:::

"Your mother's been having cramps," said Harry. "I was wondering if I could get your help brewing pain potions for her. I can manage on my own, I think, but I'm told you're a very talented potions maker."

[They brew together]

"You –" Severin lost her nerve. "You get along with my mother."

"I do," Harry said casually.

Severin didn't look at her. "You make her laugh."

"We have some shared sense of humor, yes."

Severin stared at Harry's left ear. She wanted to meet Harry's gaze, but her nerve failed her. "You have sex with her."

"I do," Harry said, low and quiet.

Severin said the words several times in her mind before she could voice them out loud: "I didn't know women could do that. I don't know what exactly they do. With each other."

The silence stretched on. Severin felt her face flush – she knew there would be spots of color on her cheekbones. She jerked her gaze to the ground and phrased, for rapid deployment, an expression of dismissal or disinterest or disgust –

"I could show you," said Harry.

Severin froze. One of her feet slid an inch on the ground, jerking for departure. "What?"

"If you want to know what exactly women do," said Harry. Her voice was too blunt to be coaxing, but it was. Coaxing. Severin was being _coaxed_. Her mind stumbled as she stared hard at Harry's face, trying to determine how much she was being mocked.

Severin must have been silent too long, because Harry stepped forward slowly, hands coming up in front of her, wandless. "We touch." She slid one hand on Severin's waist, and the other behind her neck. Her thumb ghosted over Severin's ear; she shivered violently. "We kiss," Harry said, and slid her mouth over Severin's. Her lips was warm and electrifying – Severin's mouth parted under them. Harry moved her face in a way that suddenly made their lips mostly seal against each other. She tasted like coffee and honey.

She heard herself make a noise she'd never heard from herself before. Harry laughed softly. Her gaze was entranced, her hand warm on Severin's face. "We can move to the bed, if you want, and I can show you what else I do with women."

Severin stood there dumbly, heart pounding hard enough that she was uncomfortably aware of her body. She felt her mind was split along two tracks. One said, who would do that? Sleep with a woman and then her daughter? This is perverse; she cannot be trusted to mean well towards me. The other, considerably stronger, yearned to accept, to keep being touched. To see Harry's skin underneath her clothes. To perhaps – touch her breasts and kiss them. She bit down on her lip, hard, to focus.

_No one will ever offer me this again._

"Yes," she said, with a wobble in her voice like she would cry. She cleared her throat once, harshly. "Then show me."

Harry led her to the bed and gently pushed her down. Severin fell. She did not know what to do with her limbs. Then Harry straddled her, and the question became moot, washed away by the sheer sensation of having someone's body on hers. She could not decide whether it was heavier or lighter than she'd expected. She didn't know what she'd expected. She hadn't let herself think about it in over a year, since she'd quarreled with Lily.

Harry's breasts were pressed against hers, warm and heavy through layers of fabric. Severin ran her hands up and down Harry's flanks, trying to summon up the nerve to ask if she could touch them. The thought process was cut short when Harry slid her own hand up Severin's shirt, wiggling it under her bra, and cupped the breast. Severin squirmed, eyes widening. She did not know why the sensation should shock her so much, on an area of skin that signaled no such thing to her when she scrubbed it in the shower. Then Harry rubbed at her nipple, staring without blinking at Severin's face, and Severin drew in a shaky gasp.

"Oh, how wonderful," Harry murmured, and withdrew her hand to ruck up the edge of the shirt up over Severin's bra. Then, testing the elastic of the bra itself, she pushed it up too. Severin was flat-chested, and it went up without much resistance. "Your bras aren't fitted correctly to your body, do you know that?"

Severin tensed up in irritation and terror both. Someone was looking at her body. She knew there were a few wiry black hairs growing from the skin around her nippes that was probably too long. Why had she never thought of plucking it? Because she had better things to do, and she'd never thought anyone would see. "Probably. I don't care."

"Maybe I should take you shopping sometime," said Harry musingly, and bent her head down to take a nipple – the one she'd brushed with her thumb – into her mouth. Then she swept her tongue over it, one hot liquid glide of pressure, and overturned the landscape of Severin's understanding of her body.

Severin heard herself cry out, a surprisingly high-pitched, stuttery sound. "Shh," said Harry admonishingly, and kept licking. Licking and nibbling and sucking. Severin stared at the ceiling, breath heaving wildly. There was a strange kind of pressure building between her legs, different from anything she'd felt while masturbating. She squirmed, pressing her thighs together, trying to relieve it.

Harry noticed. Without detaching her mouth from Severin's breast, she nudged her knee in between Severin's, and then drew it up so that her thigh was pressed right between Severin's legs. Severin was abruptly aware of her wet she was when the damp fabric of her underwear pressed against her flesh. She rubbed herself against Harry's leg, minute twitches that made her body tingle all the way down to her toes.

"Please, please," she said in indistinct and unthinking desperation. Harry, ruthless, transferred her mouth to the other nipple. Severin had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep quiet. "I have to – you have to let me –"

"Yes, of course," Harry said, almost crooning, and Severin had no idea if they'd actually communicated anything meaningful, surely they hadn't, but Harry's leg was drawing away – no! – to be replaced by her hand, whose fingers were curling up right up against the center of heat between Severin's legs. Harry had stopped sucking Severin's nipple and was watching her face, hungry and analytic as a witch watching a powerful and complex work of dark magic. Severin felt her face ripple as she tried to compose it against the building onslaught of sensation.

"You have to let me know what I'm doing right," Harry whispered, and then suddenly grinned. Her hand settled into a rhythm, pressing through Severin's clothing and dragging the wet fabric up and down against that center of heat: Severin's eyes prickled with it, it was simultaneously just right and not enough and too much, _too much –_

She came, into a different magnitude of sensation than anything she'd snatched alone. It hit slow but hard – she felt herself arch hard into Harry's fingers and quake, gasping. Harry leaned in, pressing her front against Severin's body, and slid a hand over Severin's mouth.

She peaked for several seconds, half-yelling into Harry's palm.

...

She watched Harry leave, undoing the silencing charm as she did so. It occured to her as she blankly stared at the closing door that Harry hadn't needed to cover her mouth, if the sound barrier would have caught the noise. Shaky with her climax, she reviewed the gesture. It occurred to her that she'd liked it anyway, in an uneasy way – the liking had a dark, jolting hook to her lower body when she thought about it.

:::

She avoided Harry for weeks. She stayed in her room most days, reading, brewing, and receiving correspondence from [Death Eater contact].

She thought about Harry when she went to bed, indulging in the remembered taste of her mouth, the transient warmth of her skin, her hard efficient hands between Severin's legs. She throbbed and leaked and tossed restlessly, staring angrily at the moon. Stupid – Severin didn't even know her.

[Attends the Death Eater raid on a wizarding household]

She Apparated into Brunden square, laden with vials. Half a dozen masked figures milled slowly beneath the trees, whispering excitedly. She spotted Rab Lestrange immediately but hesitated to approach him: she wanted to reveal what she had when more people were there.

Another dozen crackled into being in the square, some masked and some not. Severin's heart sank when she saw that they were students – one as a fourth year. Only Lestrange was a graduate – there was no way this was authorized, no way the Dark Lord had permitted him to gather the greater part of the junior ranks and storm a traitor's house.

But she'd shown up. There was no way back. She fixed her mask more firmly on her face and slid through to Rab Lestrange. "I've brought synchrony potions," she said. "Twenty of them."

Rab's eyes darted around the crowd, counting. "Then you have four left over. Give them to me."

Severin frowned but obeyed – he was senior to her.

"Everyone!" said Rab. "Here's the plan. There will be two pairs of sentries – Snape with Fawley at the front gate, Nott with Ergard at the back. Sentries are also responsible for catching anyone who tries to leave and herding them back in. We're going to take synchrony potions – Snape will hand them out – right before we storm the house at my call. Carrow leads the back advance, I lead the front."

Carrow was nodding as if this were standard. Severin didn't know. Jittering with nerves, she obeyed and started handing out vials.

Someone asked, "Who knows the Osborne house? I've never been."

"I have," Rab said. "And you'll have the sense of it after I take the potion. It wears off after thirty minutes – I'll send out a call. We Apparate out to your respective source points. If you can't Apparate, use Portkey, and destroy it _thoroughly_."

Nod all around. The last person Severin handed the potion to was Charlotte Fawley, her sentry-partner. Fawley was masked, but her eyes were full of disdain as she took the vial without touching Severin's hand. She clearly thought she was too good for the job Rab had given her.

Severin bared her teeth at her. "I'm not pleased either," she said.

Fawley said nothing.

They streamed towards the Osborne house, masks down, illusioned against Muggles. Because this was a Muggle town. The Osbornes built their estate here, a century or two ago, and the Muggles had come after. The Osbornes, unusually, had done nothing to keep them away. A Muggle pushing a cart laden with some kind of indistinct good came too close to them, without noticing – Rab barked briefly with laughter and waved the cart into the road with a contemptuous wave of his wand, overturning it. The startled Muggle veered off the sidewalk with a cry of surprise, still attached to it.

They arrived at the house, white masks and streaming black robes. Rab paused short of a final hill that separated them from the gates of the Osborne estate. He took out the potion, uncorked it, and started counting down with one hand.

Everyone drank at once. It was not an unpleasant potion, tasting more of honey than anything else. Severin had never taken it with a group before. It hit almost instantly: suddenly she was aware of the shape of the hill they were standing on with more than thirty feet. She stared at the Osborne house, with dinner lights glimmering, and knew it from more than one angle even as she saw it from one. Determination to raze it surged through her. It wasn't hers – she looked at Rab, who held two empty vials in his hand.

His grin was narrow and bright in the moonlight. "Now we hunt."

They immediately knew what to do. Severin and Fawley ran forward to flank the front doors. Masked Death Eaters surged into the house between them, pausing just enough so that they could hit the back at the same time.

Severin leaned against the wall, scanning the periphery. Fawley had her head tipped back, tuning in only to the world inside the house. Severin shot a mild shock hex at her. Fawley yelped and came awake. "Focus," Severin hissed. "We have a job."

"Nothing's going to happen yet, we caught them by surprise," Fawley snapped, lowering her instinctively-raised wand. "And you can cover me."

"Oh, will I?"

"What else are you going to do? Go into trance yourself, and leave us undefended? Let me be injured, and answer to the Dark Lord for it? Who do you think he'd blame: me, or a halfbreed?"

Half a dozen ways to murder Fawley came into Severin's mind. She slowly swept her gaze from Fawley's face to the house, which was ringing with battle. Briefly, the door opened, a small body trying to break out. They got two steps out of the house before some magic yanked them back, flailing and airborne, back in. The door slammed close.

Severin looked back at Fawley, inventing accidents. She saw Fawley shiver. Smiling briefly, coldly, she mostly closed her eyes and leaned back against the stone as if she'd tuned out of the world around her, and into the fight inside the house.

"Unbelievable!" Fawley snarled. Her wand jerked back up. Severin's hand, unseen to Fawley, tightened around her own. But Fawley's gaze darted around the still-silent land around the Osborne estate. Severin could see Aurors popping up in her mind's eye. Snarling, Fawley settled into wait.

After half a minute, Severin let herself slip into listening for real, just for a few seconds. She opened her mind up to the bloodthirsty roar –

Smeone inside was screaming in a silenced room, loud absolute Cruciatus-screams –

Two Death Eaters were pounding down the hallway in pursuit of a young man, whom Severin knew to be on his way to call the Aurors –

Someone was fighting Petra Osborne, whose face Severin recognized from Hogwarts dinners, teeth bared, crackling with magic –

... 

Someone came hurtling out of the house. Two someones, an adult and a preteen. A masked Death Eater flew out in pursuit. Severin's mind wavered confusedly for a second – the sight of the two Osbornes in flight triggered some sympathetic instinct in her, and she thought she must help. Then she remembered herself and erected a barrier. The adult cried out in dismay, the child plowed ahead, and bounced off of it, unconscious. Fawley said, "Coward!"

Severin didn't process the insult, because she was staring at a tall Death Eater – Rab – who had come out in pursuit of the two. He extended his wand. Ribbons of light sliced out of it, and deeply burned the man's body where they landed.

Severin stared. She rather thought the man was dead. She'd seen a dead body once before, half out of an alleyway in her home town. A waxy-faced Muggle being investigated by crows. Her mother had grabbed her hand and hurried her home. This was different: the man's face still held shocked vitality.

"Aurors in a minute! Time to leave." said Rab. The voice did not carry, but the word spread from mind to mind within seconds. Fawley Portkeyed out immediately, to Severin's disgust. When Rab started sprinting towards the nearest Apparition point, she followed. It was a race between them and the –

\- witches snapping into existence ahead of them, wands out. They too were masked – not the ornate bone of the Death Eaters, but the garish and eclectic feathers of birds. Not Aurors, but the witches and wizards who had dedicated themselves to opposing the Dark Lord. 

[Severin gets away]

...

She stole into her room, shaking, and sat down on her bed. She was unsure if that had been fun. She was unsure whether, if she could do it again, she would choose to be in the attacking party. She kept thinking of the man who had tried to escape and had died. Perhaps he hadn't died. Perhaps they could save him. She cycled through Potions for burns in her head.

She did not hate the Osbornes. She could not imagine cutting them down with the glee that Rab had shown. She could do it to the Potters, she thought. Perhaps one day the Death Eaters would go after Potter and his friends, and Severin would be in a room taking her turn to cast the Cruciatus on them. That she could do. But without such involvement, she could not summon up bloodthirst. The thought of it, in fact, made her feel mildly sick. ( _What for?_ she kept thinking, when she thought of the burned man on the grass.) She knew this was weakness that the Dark Lord did not want in his followers, and that it would cost her standing if she let it show. So she must not. But she did not want to go on a raid again, either, unless it was against someone she personally hated.

It was not late, only nine in the evening. It had only been two hours since she'd stolen out of the house. Agitated, she got up and made herself some toast with jam in the kitchen. She ate it pacing. She had to talk to someone, but she was alone.

[Several days pass, Severin feels hunted and a little traumatized]

In a moment of desperate, she went and knocked on Harry's door, not knowing what she'd say. But Harry was not inside.

Without really thinking, she tried the door. It opened.

This had once been her room. It was the easiest thing to slip inside.

The rickety shelf she'd once put manuals and vial racks on was still there, mostly empty. There was a pair of socks on it, and a jacket. Three books, but when she picked them up, she saw that all the text – even the title and the author names – had been encoder charmed, and she could not read them. She put them down. At least one looked like a Muggle paperback. She fingered the sleeve of the jacket, staring around.

There was a large suitcase in the corner of the room, with a mound of clothes rising out of it, a heap of robes and jeans. There was a mattress under the one window, where Severin's foldable brewing table had once stood. It was covered by a rumpled blanket and a thin pillow. Severin sat down on the mattress. There was something very peaceful about sitting here, in someone else's room that had once been hers, as if she were reclaiming it. Or going back to a time when it had been hers, before her current troubles had reached her.

Some time passed, Severin didn't know what. She was exhausted and foggy and horribly sad in some way. The door opened, and Harry stared at her. She was in Muggle clothes, and her hair clung sweatily to her forehead, as if from recent revelry.

Harry said, "You're in the wrong room."

Severin said, "I'm having an odd evening."

Harry came and sat next to her. She smelled like exertion, and it pulled at something in Severin's body. "Are you drunk?"

"No." Severin thought about it for a few seconds. "But I wish I were."

Harry touched her knee briefly. "What's going on with you?"

When she was initiated, Severin had sworn herself to the cause of the Dark Lord – here, and only here, were they allowed to use his true name, which was Voldemort. They said, one by one, "I entrust the ownership of my skills as a witch and wizard and human to my Lord, Voldemort, who will bend this collective talent to the project of rescuing the wizarding society of Britain and beyond from the hobbling influence of Muggles and their progeny."

"I don't know where to apply my talents," said Severin. "I don't know who to give them to."

Harry's smile was a little said, and absurdly beautiful. "Why can't you keep them for yourself?"

"Is that what you did with yours?"

Harry scratched absently at her bangs. "No. I gave them to an older wizard because I thought his projects were important, and I didn't have any."

"I don't have a project either. Maybe we just get subsumed by people who do. Maybe it's what happens to most everyone."

Harry said, "Let's go to a bar."

Severin exhaled into her cupped hands, shaking a little. "Yes."

Harry went to her open suitcase and rummaged around for a few seconds before she pulled out a robe. A fashion that Severin didn't quite recognize – American, maybe. Fine, although clearly not new, and long on her. Harry stripped out of her sweaty top before pulling it on.

"There's a Muggle bar five blocks down on," she said.

"I know." It was one of the latest-closing bars in town. Tobias had used to haunt it. Severin considered making some other suggestion, but as she watched Harry adjust the cuffs on her robe – looking every inch a witch – she found that she liked the idea, going to the bar where her Muggle father had made a fool of himself for years, sitting above it all with her witch companion. Her witch companion who had, at least on one occasion, wanted her.

This felt like a date. It definitely wasn't – surely? But the idea had a strong pull. Severin, following Harry out of the door, found herself compulsively thinking about it, and of the word _girlfriend_ , which to Severin seemed puerile and soppy – surely she herself would never be a _girlfriend_ , never _have_ a girlfriend, but she thought the word attached itself easily to Harry. Harry could easily be someone's girlfriend, or have a girlfriend.

Girlfriend.

They covered themselves in notice me not spells as they walked down the street. Severin started feeling good about life for the first time in days – walking down a street, hidden from Muggles, with an attractive and well dressed witch – pureblooded, if her features were anything to go by – to a _bar_ , a locale that had never seemed charming to Severin before but seemed inordinately interesting to Severin now.

The bar, which she had never been inside, was smoky and half-full, dirty tired Cokeworth men gabbling. Severin pulled up a barrier around herself to deflect the sometimes-weaving patrons due to collide with her, and then felt self conscious when she saw that Harry was doing no such thing, merely angling herself to let them past. Some of them smelled rather bad. Harry found an open seat at the bar, and gestured at Severin to join her.

Severin didn't know what to order, or how to get the bartender's attention. Harry, perhaps noticing this, waved down the man within a minute and asked for two glasses of something that Severin didn't recognize. It turned out to be beer, dark gold and frothed. The glass was welcomingly cold in the bar, which was muggy with drunk human bodies in addition to the summer heat outside. Severin willed herself not to make a face, and then drank the beer.

It was surprisingly not terrible. She drank it in long hard gulps until the glass was half-drained. When she put it down, Harry was looking at her in an interested way. Her eyes were green, which Severin had always thought was the prettiest color for eyes to be. All you could tell from a distance was that they were light, and you got closer to them and they were a color you simply did not expect to find associated with human bodies.

Severin had been staring for too long. She looked away.

"Where should your talents be applied, then?" said Harry, sipping. It occurred to Severin that she had no idea how payment worked here.

...

"Hogwarts is shit," Severin said, trying not to slur. She regretted her frankness when Harry looked at her invitingly. She did not want Harry to know anything of her inner life. Her mortification at the prospect of Harry's contempt of it warred with her desire for more of her to be known to Harry; for more of Harry's mental space to be occupied by her, Severin Snape. A kick of alcohol-fueled courage shook another sentence out of her. Towards the inviting, luminous shell of Harry's ear under lamplight: "I thought when I started my first year that I could find – like-minded people. Instead it's just dramas and factions and... low-minded, stupid rivalries. It's children. I don't want to be around children."

"You didn't make friends," said Harry. Her tone seemed gentle; her words felt like an axe cutting into Severin's core, laying bare the heartwood, the difficulties and secret miseries and bitternesses Severin fought to conceal from everyone in her life. It hurt to be alone. She yearned to be something other than alone. But if aloneness was a constant, she would never show to the world that excluded her that its exclusion pained her. She wanted to be seen to choose it.

She tried to recoup, badly and clumsily. "I didn't want it from any of them."

"Liar," Harry said, with an adult's lofty amusement. Severin bristled. She was furiously searching for weapons or insults when Harry short-circuited the process by leaning in to cup her cheek. Her exhale was warm, smelling of lagers and bar popcorn. "Severin. Almost everyone wants to be liked and loved. It's not shameful to admit you're one of them. Do you want to be liked?"

Severin's cheeks burned. It was impossible to look away from Harry's face. Her gaze seemed to have its own gravity. She panicked and simply said, "Yes."

Harry's smile was slow and secretive. "Do you want to be loved?"

No one invited Severin into secrets. She said, starved and drunk, "Yes."

Harry took Severin's hand and led her down the path, along the stream, down where the trees thickened. Where the copse she'd spent so many lazy days with Lily in was. A minute short of it, Harry stopped and conjured a mattress on a blanket of dry grass. 

"Not here!" Severin protested. They were in clear view of anyone who came downhill on the other side of the stream.

"Trust my silencing and Confunding spells," Harry said. "I'm very good at them. No one will hear us, and if they're close enough to hear us they're close enough for a confusion shield. And I'm willing to bet that you're good with a Memory Charm or two. You've got the look."

Severin took it as a compliment. Harry was right, but she chose not to verbally incriminate herself to brag, even to one of the most beautiful women who had even looked at Severin that year so far. She chose to give Harry a smug look and let her draw her own conclusions.

"Fine," said Severin. She didn't want to be the first one down on the mattress. "Have it your way."

Harry bounded onto the mattress, muttering a longish spell that Severin didn't catch. Her clothes flew into the air and packed themselves neatly onto a flat stone nearby. She landed with her breasts pointing at Severin, whose mouth had gone strangely dry. Actually, she wasn't quite sure if she could still feel her mouth at all, or if all of her brainpower was surging to fuel her visual cortex. "Come have fun," Harry said.

Severin stumbled forward to straddle her, subconsciously seeking to shield Harry from the cold or from the view lines across the stream. Soft warm skin. She wanted to bury her face into it, so she did. There was so much skin underneath her. She would have frozen up if she'd stopped to think, but she didn't think. She started kissing Harry's neck, shivering when her chin bumped down against the slope of a breast. Harry's breast. It was shaped differently from hers. Smaller-radius arcs, unblemished, a richer hue, like the warm light wood that furnished some of beautiful banisters at school. She looked like she belonged behind stanchions in a museum.

"You look like art. I mean – you're so beautiful, and –" Severin stuttered to a stop, grimacing with embarrassment.

Harry's face did something strange. Maybe suppressed laughter or disdain at the clumsy compliment, Severin couldn't tell. "You can touch me, though. You should touch me."

"Ah," Severin said, and reached out.

She ran her hands down Harry's body. Her skin was glorious. At school Severin had seen girls walking in and out of the bath. Severin herself showered very early in the morning or very late at night, when no one was around, and walked in and out of the stalls fully clothed. But the other girls wrapped themselves in soft towels with their corners tucked into the upper edges over their breasts, shoulders and knees bare, passing between their rooms and the showers, sometimes weaving close to where Severin was working in the common space. The closeness to their nudity, even when they were not beautiful, was electrifying. And this, this was electrifying. She could not look at all of Harry's body at once. She fixed her eyes on one patch of skin at a time, taking it in.

The words spilled out of her unbidden. "I want to make you come."

Harry's mouth quirked unevenly. "I'm not easy."

"I'm used to working for hard things."

Harry's face did that complicated thing again, making Severin uneasy, wondering whether she'd said the wrong thing. But she kept sweeping her hand up and down Harry's body while she waited for Harry to answer. She went from shoulder to thigh, crossing the thaumaturgic landmarks of Harry's left nipple and the edge of her pubic hair, which like hers was dark and bristly. Severin longed to run her fingers through it, test the texture, but did not dare, in case it was too strange, too presumptuous.

"I'd rather we do something different," Harry said, and nudged her hand up Severin's skirt. "We don't have a lot of time, and I have things to show you."

"What do you mean, we don't have a lot of time?" said Severin, but she was already acquiescing with her body to Harry's nimble fingers pull down her underwear, pulling her knees together and angling her hips to give Harry an easier time of it. "Harry, I don't – I don't know if I want to get naked here."

"You don't have to," said Harry, and slid down the mattress so that she could put her hand under Severin's skirt without pushing the hem up past her thighs. Questing fingertips stroked hair, tickled the seam between her legs, and then slid into the gap between them.

"Oh!" said Severin, in indistinct shock. "That's –"

It was better than when she did it. Perhaps it was the angle. Harry's fingers were curling in a way she'd never thought of trying, perhaps couldn't try. She was stroking at something _inside_ Severin's body, some secret patch of flesh. Severin shook, as much out of surprise as out of arousal. She reached out and grabbed at Harry's warm bare shoulder to steady herself somehow, and without really thinking about it started rocking back on Harry's hand.

Bliss. She couldn't help but moan, low and unfamiliar. She tangled her hand in Harry's hair, soft fragrant curly different.

Harry nosed at the inside of Severin's thigh and then up. It produced a sensation like tickling but – more, all over, and better. Severin heard herself gasping and panting, and why? She couldn't tell how this thing was so strong, just a point of light sensation moving up, and...

Severin didn't believe what was going to happen until the moment Harry's tongue brushed against her clitoris.   
She had sometimes lain awake while her dormmates giggled about their boyfriends, the things they did in bed. The whole thing disgusted her faintly and she'd tried to block it out. She did not want to block this out. It was wonderful, better than the fingers.

...

"Harry," Severin said. "Where do you come from? What do you do? Why are you here, in..." She waved her hand out at the smoggy sky, behind which lay the stars. "Here?"

"I write Muggle fiction," said Harry.

Severin laughed. She couldn't help but notice that Harry did had the look of a Muggle writer, the young modern kind. (Severin somehow still knew these things, despite having unhooked herself from her Muggle home as much as possible.) She looked elegant with a cigarette crooked in her mouth, her pants fit her body perfectly. She had the beautiful, untrustworthy face of someone who never said all they knew. Severin thought she must write beautiful, untrustworthy stories. "You're joking. What do you write?"

The stars blurred in Severin's vision as Harry said, "I'm writing about a woman tries to destroy a sorceror who has made himself immortal, with strange magic no one quite understands. He parcels out his being into artifacts and animals and hides them so well that they cannot be retrieved and destroyed. A fragment of his life is sent out towards the stars, so far away that the strongest Summoning spell could not find it. A fragment is hidden somewhere deep in the mountains of South America, where certain subterranean ores and alloys interfere with magical detection. And so forth. It seems that finding and destroying these constructs will be impossible. For some time, she despairs."

Severin's head swayed and pounded. She was not really listening – she was distracted with her dread that she would be sick, at this moment when she was so deliriously happy. With the dread that she was too drunk to listen and parry properly when she had Harry's conversation, her attention. She tried to pull herself together.

"But her very clever friend has come up with a counter to his magic, one that has never been deployed before. The friend proposes to smear him out of existence – across existence, in fact, scattering his being so that he could never cohere again. If he cannot be brought together to be destroyed, he must be disintegrated so thoroughly that he cannot even be a thing."

Severin kept her head very still. Harry was a good storyteller – Severin's skin was prickling. "Does she succeed?"

"Yes, but in the process, she herself is swept across the universes. She was attached to him in some way she did not understand, and the blast took her along with it. Where she landed, she could not find her way home from. And in the process of crossing those universes, she realized something. Every single reality that can happen, has happened. Or is happening. She saw back and forth in time, and saw her own life in all its variations. And she realized that everything that she had done right or wrong had not mattered; that for every turn taken, there was another reality where she did something different. And rather than directing the path of her life, she was simply walking on one of the infinite predetermined paths."

"So your novel is existentialist," Severin said with some satisfaction. Existentialism had been popular a few years ago among the Slytherin upperclassmen, and she had acquainted herself with the concepts accordingly.

Harry made a noise that implied Severin's contribution was not very good. Severin felt chastised and small, suddenly. "I write about what keeps me up at night. It's horror, Severin."

"How so?" Severin said, cut off midway by Harry rambling on to answer anyway. "Imagine if you saw over the vistas of space and time as if it were a lake under you. A lake of vast and drowning possibilities. You could dive into one – at random, in this one I'm broken by my childhood or all the ones where I'm born as a boy – with the hormone and neurology stuff swapped out for my dad's chromosome."

"What's a chromosome?" Severin said.

Harry ignored her, but not rudely – Severin thought – she hoped. "And every slice of reality at any time is indistinguishable as real from any other. The one where you solved the problems or won the war, and the ones you didn't. If you leave them alone for a while and wade ahead a few more years, choose a future and go in, the effects will have ripped through that society in a real way – universes persisted without you. And the vastness of those implications, that everything that could have happened, happened – no!"

...

Severin picked the clearest thought in her mind and expressed it. "If I were seized by the conviction all possible universe existed that nothing I did mattered because I was merely a sequence whose existence, start to end, is bound to exist – I would assume that I had been cursed, that an enemy of mine wanted me driven insane."

"You have a lot of enemies like that?"

"Perhaps," Severin said, and bit her lip. She thought it was more that she knew a lot of people who would do that.

"A curse," Harry said, musing. "I suppose it's possible."

Severin said, "Don't change your plot on my account." She decided not to say more about Harry's story. It wasn't to Severin's taste – it had a very Muggle wishy-washiness to it, but she was reluctant to criticize it. She said also, very reluctantly: "I may be sick."

Harry conjured her a bucket. "I won't look if you don't want."

"Don't," Severin said, and hurled briefly. It was her second time vomiting after drinking. She'd promised herself after the first time she'd never drink enough to be sick again. She waited a minute, was sick one more time. She groped for her wand to vanish the bucket.

"No minors performing magic under the influence," Harry said, grabbing her hand.

"You're not serious," Severin said, petulant and unhappy about being petulant. Her mouth felt foul.

"I'm definitely serious, I don't want you taking off your own hand." Harry took care of the bucket.

"I'm a better witch than that."

"I thought I was a better witch than that last year when I vanished a box of morning-after potion and my left shoe instead of my bottle of whiskey."

Severin gave a chokey, unattractive, genuine laugh. She couldn't believe Harry had admitted that to her. She sat up to look at Harry's face, to search for embarrassment or something else, when Harry handed her a cup of water she must have silently conjured.

"Thank you," Severin said. It was weirdly hard to say, and she found that she couldn't meet Harry's eyes after all. The water was cool and clean-tasting and washed away the gunk in her mouth and throat.

Insects shrilled around them. The bank of the stream was familiar. Severin had walked across it when it had been muddy and dusty and pebbly. This is she and other Muggle children came to play in the summer, where local Muggle teens thought was romantic for walks – the only patch of green within the bounds of the town. It was a plain and inextraordinary place where she had spent the plain and inextraordinary part of her life.

And she'd just lost her virginity here, in some significant way that she hadn't in her bedroom [a few weeks ago], with a very strange lover: a witch who lied about her occupation, who would seduce a woman and then her daughter.

...

[Harry makes her play.]

Severin comes home from some outing. She shut the door behind her at the same time someone said, "Expelliarmus." The tone was so conversational that she wasn't even alarmed until she heard her wand clatter to the ground, several feet away. She jerked around to face her assailant – Harry. The voice was Harry's.

"Obviously, there are things about myself I haven't told you," Harry said, picking up the wand. Severin saw that there was a snake, small and dull, coiled loosely around Harry's wrist. "Sit down. You are going to do two things for me."

Severin obeyed numbly. There was no way to mistake being disarmed as anything other than a sign of hostility. "What do you want?"

Harry tossed her a deck of Muggle playing cards. It was new, unopened, still taped shut. Severin recognized it as being from the Muggle convenience store, next to the shelf with the cigarettes. "Open it and shuffle."

Was she serious? Severin scratched the tape loose and shook out the cards. "What is this about?" She'd wanted to be cold, unimpressed, but her voice came out a monotone. It would have to do.

"Creating an anchor," said Harry, mysteriously. "In case things go wrong and I need to start over. Shuffle until that clock says it's a quarter to one."

Severin looked at the clock. "You disarmed me to force me to shuffle Muggle cards for seven minutes?"

Harry said, pleasantly, "I disarmed you to do that, and also to be taken to your master when you're done."

Severin's hands moved mechanically. _Shwup shwup_. "I don't know what you're talking about." She almost meant it. How could Harry know? Harry belonged to a different world. Was supposed to belong to a different world. The world where she bought drinks for Severin and took her into the woods to kiss her and touch her under her clothes and make her laugh, which had nothing in common with the rest of Severin's life, the one where she brewed for the most powerful wizard in Britain, where she sometimes went hunting for his enemies and saw them sliced apart under the moonlight.

"Don't play dumb," Harry said. "You wear his mark on your arm."

 _Shwup, shwup._ "There are easier ways to join him than to insult and blackmail his valued potioneer."

Harry's exhale sounded impatient. "You think he values you?"

"I know he values me." Severin wasn't sure at all, but she needed Harry to think there would be consequences if she hurt Severin. Everyone was scared of the Dark Lord. It was the only leverage she had to make people not hurt her.

Harry's mouth tightened, but she didn't respond. The minutes ticked on.

"What I don't understand," said Severin, with a minute to go, "is why you bothered to sleep with me. You thought, perhaps, that it would make me more pliant when you reached this point in your plan?"

Harry's expression lightened momentarily. "Pliant? God, no. I slept you with you because I wanted to."

Impossibly, stupidly, that made Severin feel good. She was trying to think of what to say when Harry said, "Time's up. Put the cards back in the box, and put the box in your pocket."

Severin obeyed. Her fingers were tired from shuffling. "What now?"

"Now we Apparate. Where is it – the Malfoy mansion? The Lestrange estate?"

"He's with the Yaxleys," said Severin. "And I'm not walking into their estate without my wand."

"If all goes well, you won't need to perform any magic at all," said Harry.

...

[Severin thinking furiously] Could she call Harry's bluff and risk – no. No. What happened if she took Harry to the Dark Lord, as Harry wished? The Dark Lord would incapacitate, interrogate, and kill. Perhaps he would make Severin do the killing. _HOW COULD HARRY DO_ And Severin would be made a fool of. She would start her last year of Hogwarts an object of complete derision – the respect she had earned in her house since she'd become a Death Eater would fade away. What if that happened, and Eileen died because Harry had never intended to save her after all?

Severin considered being stranded like that and something in her started screaming like a thing whose every organ had been torn away but the lungs.

...

[At the Yaxley estate]

The snake curled around Severin's left wrist. Harry handed her back her wand. She took it, feeling a pathetic pang that Harry remembered her dominant hand. It was a relief to have her wand back, even though she was just as helpless as before.

"Everything will be all right if you follow my lead," said Harry.

"Very credible," Severin snarled.

...

The door slammed open, and the Dark Lord glided in.

He was tall and beautiful and crackled with power. Severin's female peers who had been initiated at the same time had talked about his looks incessantly for weeks afterwards: what luck they had to follow a Dark Lord with _style_! Severin had been acutely grateful that no one expected her to experience sexual attraction or urges, because she would not have known how to mask her lack of response to him. She worshipped him, but didn't want him to touch her. Rumor was it that he'd taken Bellatrix Lestrange – "Lucky Bella!" – to bed, and Severin couldn't imagine it, couldn't imagine having his long lean body on her, couldn't imagine the snake-yellow gaze on her face.

"What's this news about the potion, Severin?" he said sharply. His gaze fell on Harry, and narrowed unpleasantly. "And who is this? You brought an outsider into my potions room?"

"I'm not actually," Severin said, and her tongue stuck in her mouth. She stared helplessly at the Dark Lord. How to explain this to him? This was terrible. He would punish Harry terribly, and Severin would be utterly humiliated. Fuck Harry for making her do this.

Harry stepped forward and stuck out her hand, grinning widely. She hissed long and low, and to Severin – who had heard the sound of a natural snake many times – read it as a snakesound that throbbed with human enchantment. She'd heard Parseltongue before, from the Dark Lord's mouth as he communicated with or commanded snakes. His language was to the snake's as vectors was to scalars, or choirs were to single singers. And when Harry spoke in that language – and it was a language, even if Severin had access to it.

"America?" said Severin's master, in a rare moment of surprise she'd seen in him ever. "Oh, but –" He slipped into Parseltongue, a long and urgent few sentences of magically resonant snakespeech.

Harry sat back, standing and grinning a little. She was an attractive woman – quietly furious and taken aback as he was, the Dark Lord was softening just a little, and Severin could see it act on him.

...

Nothing about that sentence made sense. But the Dark Lord's eyes flared in shock: something about it had alarmed him. Severin had started backing away from the pair of them when he pulled out his wand in one fluid motion –

And Harry tackled him.

Severin hadn't seen anyone being tackled since she was in primary school with Muggles. A lot of things happened at once. A large snake came whipping into the room. ...

[Harry, having gotten through all his safeguards in some way, kills Voldemort with Sectumsempra]

[Right afterwards] The Dark Lord's mark burned, abruptly and with forge-force. Severin screamed, a strange polyphonic scream; it took her a minute to realize that the other screams were coming from elsewhere in the room. She was on the ground and did not know how she'd gotten there. Harry was crouching above her, looking strangely apathetic for someone who had just killed Britain's next great wizard. "What poor choices we've all made," she said, touching Severin's forehead. Severin shuddered, and the world wavered out of being.

:::

She was lying on a seat much softer than the floor she'd been on before. Her vision flickered unreliably: Harry was examining a wall full of corked potions with some urgency. There was a large mirror next to that wall that showed an office. The thought nudged at Severin that she knew the office. It was Dumbledore's. It was not a mirror but some doorway, set in a mirror's frame.

Harry was standing above her, pouring potions into her mouth. Severin could not decide whether to reject them or swallow. She managed some confused mixture of the two actions which resulted in hot sticky liquid streaming down her chin and onto her robe. It smelled of [healing ingredients].

"Stupid, stupid," Harry said, and forced her mouth open. Severin swallowed the next potion. A few second later, the pain from her arm – no, her whole body, it had metastasized – fuzzed out abruptly. So did the rest of the world. She closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, Dumbledore was there. He and Harry were arguing. Or at least, Harry sounded like she was arguing.

"...didn't like it when I was sleeping through Muggle London, I thought you might consider this an improvement."

"I do not like it either when you recreate the mistakes of your heroes," said Dumbledore. Azkaban, thought Severin blearily, looking at that lined, stern face. "And cruelly."

...

She woke up again in a place she recognized well – infirmary. Dumbledore and Harry were still arguing, now a few feet away from the foot of her bed rather than across her.

"...what I want," Harry said. "I feel like I deserve to get what I want, after I've rid you of so much trouble."

"Perhaps you think this will make her a hero? It will not. What you are doing is cruel. Everyone who once gave her acceptance will turn against her – they have turned against her. The people you hope will be grateful will not accept her."

"Then make them accept her. I know how many webs you can weave..."

Consciousness flickered, but not for long – when Severin came to again, the sun was still up-but-low. There was only Dumbledore, and he was staring right at her. Pathetically, she squeezed her eyes shut for a second, thinking to feign sleep, and then opened them again. She was not a coward. The curtains around her bed had been drawn – there was little noise outside, but what there was was muffled and continuous, as if a sound barrier lay between her and a steady din.

Severin looked at her left arm – it was wrapped in bandages, and ached underneath.

"Severin," said her headmaster. "Do you understand that Voldemort is dead?"

"I do," she said. Her voice was cracked and weak.

"It is out that you have killed him," Dumbledore said. "Harry has left a trail of evidence pointing at you, and will not take any credit for the deed. She never had any existence in any wizarding registry and plans to disappear before anyone can question her. She has done too much. Neither you nor I will convince anyone differently."

"No," Severin whispered.

"Yes. It is already happpening. The press is baying at the doors and cannot be kept off for more than a few hours. The wands of everyone at the scene, including yours, have already been collected by the Aurors. The body is being examined."

Severin said, "My mother. Harry threatened my mother."

Dumbledore went oddly silent. His eyes glittered, like an ocean that could swallow fleets. "I'll send someone to go and check your house immediately."

"Thank you," Severin said. She watched Dumbledore create a silvery messenger construct and whispered to it. As it flew away, the flap of the curtain ripped open. She saw a robed and masked person in a gurney being rushed down the aisle.

She pointed down at it. "Who..."

"They are Hogwarts students," said Dumbledore. "Now listen to me. I am going to tell you a story of how you came to have second thoughts about becoming a servant to Voldemort in the past year, how you were conscripted as a assistant potioneer for many of his experiments, and how you came to witness a fatal mistake he made while brewing – one that left his normal defenses open. And how you decided to take the opportunity to kill him rather than accept a life of servitude. You can choose to accept it as the course of events. Or you can face the consequences that every other now-exposed Death Eater will face."

"They'll never believe me."

Dumbledore studied her. He said, "You have more people on your side than you think, Severin."

"Do I have an alternative?" she said, abruptly fatigued. "Tell me this story."

[He does, in detail]

And she sensed that he was telling her about the person he wished she had been instead.

:::

[Harry comes to see her. Severin now understands that Harry's story about being spread out all over possible universes is true, that Harry is drifting in a life where her choices have no meaning, no consequence, because she can go to a universe with a different outcome at any point.]

"I am a consequence," said Severin.

:::

Then James.

Then Lily.

Severin stared at Lily. She thought, I'm seeing Harry's face everywhere. I _am_ going crazy.

Lily said, "Dumbledore and a woman named Harriet Dunting came and talked to me for a long while. About you."

"Oh?" Severin desperately needed to know what Harry had said to her. She tried to think of a mean, proud way to ask. But she was so tired, and Lily was looking at her in the eyes for the first time in over a year. She felt pathetic and overexposed as Lily examined her, but she couldn't bear to turn away.

The silence dragged on for an uncomfortable amount of time, and then Lily abruptly burst into tears. "Oh, you _are_ sorry!"

Severin stared at Lily's perfect skin, interrupted only by a sweet spray of freckles, and said almost wearily, "I kept wishing you'd have some bad breakout of acne. And you'd come to me and say, it's nothing personal, you're good at that potion, so here's half a Galleon. And I'd brew the Clearwater as well as I knew how to, and put in all the additions that I know make it better, and toss it to you saying, I don't need the money. And you'd go home and use the potion, and it would be so good that you'd realize how much I'm willing to do for you. Want to do for you. Lily."

It was so easy to say, all of it, even though she was getting choked up at the end.

"I guess it's really crazy of me." Lily hiccuped once. "They say you killed Voldemort? But all I can care about is – whether you still want to be my friend."

"I do," Severin said raspily. She had to clear her throat. "I'm sorry – I'm very tired. You'll have to make this short. But you should come back? Afterwards?"

:::

Ending (not too committed to it):

Severin stays in Lily's house for the rest of the break. She learns that the Order had been planning a masive coordinated strike that year that would have killed a lot of people on both sides – deaths that have now been averted. Harry has vanished. Her social life is in chaos. A lot of people aren't talking to her, but a lot more people see her as a hero.

Eileen isn't too upset by Harry's disappearance – it was never more than a very pleasant fling for her, although it changed her life. Having discovered her compatibility with women, she explores dating again, and within a few years is married to another witch. She's very happy.

After graduation, Severin starts a reputable career, but feels dirty about it. She's thought a lot about Voldemort by now and realizes what an epic mistake it was to join. She can't talk about it to anybody. She thinks about Harry a lot, still, whom she hasn't seen in four years. She keeps the pack of cards Harry made her shuffle, which is perfectly, unnaturally ordered.

One day she gets a letter from Harry. It starts, "Dear consequence," and goes to inform Severin that Harry has never left this universe – has decided her sanity rests on only staying in one timeline – and has been building a life of her own, albeit quieter and less glamorous than Severin's. It asks for a limited amount of forgiveness, and invites Severin to correspond over owl in a way that may one day culminate in their meeting again.

Severin, trembling with things unfinished, accepts.


	2. Ceteris Paribus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape is stripped of magic after the war. While getting a degree in computer engineering, he ends up hanging out with post war Harry who’s taking a long break from the wizarding world.

A year after the war ended, they met again in the cafe in the economics building. That's what Harry told people anyway, when he had to explain. By 'met', he meant that Snape had slammed a hardcover textbook on the table where Harry was working through a chemistry problem set and said, "Why are you spying on me?"

The bang had Harry on a defensive crouch on the floor, wand out. He hastily cast an attention deflection charm got it back in his Muggle-proof holster, trying not to draw attention. "Snape!" he hissed. "What are – I'm not – wait, are you spying on _me_?"

Snape gave him a look of pure hatred. "Don't give me the idiot routine. What are you here for?"

"I'm enrolled as a student!" said Harry.

"Oh, really? In what course?"

"Art," Harry said defiantly. "Not that it's any of your business, you bloody rude wanker. Why are you here?"

Snape's voice was arctic. "I'm studying computer engineering."

"Oh? That sounds... challenging." Harry hadn't the basics one needed to do any kind of engineering at a Muggle university. "If that's what you do to relax, I guess, more power to you."

Then he came to his senses. Why was he trying to be polite? Snape was the one who'd come by, slamming books on his table, accusing him of spying – he was about to open his mouth and tell Snape that he could fuck off now, surely they could arrange not to have their paths cross, when he saw the expression on Snape's face. Murderously, the man hissed, "Relax? I'm not trying to relax, Potter, I'm trying to build up a new fucking vocation. I suppose [you, spoiled, prancing,]"

"A new vocation?" Harry said slowly. "But what for? You can... brew, even if no one will hire you, surely..."

Snape sat down. Harry opened his mouth in protest, and then shut it again. "Potter. They stripped me of my magic."

He hadn't even known people would do that. "They? Oh..." The Wizengamot. All the trials Harry hadn't been conscious for.

Snape looked marveling. "You didn't know."

Harry said, "I woke up, I grabbed my stuff, and I left."

"Without bothering to do even the most basic of catch-up –"

"Aside from the Weasleys, I don't even know who's dead."

Snape's mouth sagged open. "You're joking."

"I don't know. I don't care. I don't get wizarding post. I talk to Hermione and Ron, but they don't know where I am, and I've told them not to give me news. And –" Harry said, as fiercely as he could, "I don't want you to, either."

"Bury your head in the sand –"

"Why fucking NOT?" Harry said. His fists were clenched. He was ready to deck Snape. "I'm done. I'm done with Wizarding Britain and I'm done with you. Go harangue one of the other fifteen thousand students enrolled here. Get away from me and never talk to me again."

Snape's lips were cracked. "Or what? You'll hex me?"

"Maybe I'll addle one of your Muggle professors to give you a bad grade," Harry said coolly. "Perhaps take an irrational disliking to you? Unfairly give you low marks?"

Snape bared his teeth and rose to leave. Harry hadn't quite done a good enough job with the attention deflection – their spot of the cafe was still drawing glances, although they tended to foggily meander away after a second. "Very well, then. [one final insult]"

:::

// But then they run into each other again when Snape is struggling with something in a uniquely demagicked way. Some trivial inconvenience like getting locked in/out of a building (library), or struggling to move his stuff, or, something. Harry helps him out. Snape clearly misses magic, which Harry doesn't.

"Do you want to..." Harry gestured aimlessly. He didn't know how to phrase his offer.

Snape glared. "To what?"

"Ask me every once in a while when you need magic done."

Harry had seen Snape angry a lot – the man was low-key pissed at everything all the time – but the expression on his face was different. Building up to some terrible explosion that, Harry thought, would hurt him a lot more than it would hurt Harry. He raised his wand, mind racing through spells, trying to find the one that would help him demonstrate – what he felt – which couldn't be said, only shown. Hex, semi-dark curse, useless Transfiguration, curse, curse, shield spell, aha –

He pointed at the tree above them and said, "Florete."

It wasn't in season. Harry wasn't even sure if it was a tree that flowered normally. But the branches welled abruptly with flowers. Pale, shining blossoms fell around them. [Tree keeps on regenerating] Harry immediately felt stupid – a trite Valentine's day spell, for Merlin's sake, Snape was going to rip him a new one –

Snape's face was... Harry couldn't look away. Hollow, enchanted, grieved. "Put it away, you stupid child," he rasped. "Unless you want to be hounded by magical secrecy enforcement in your retirement."

Harry stopped pouring his magic into it. The air was suddenly fragrant. Snape inhaled unsteadily.

"Do you want to meet this Friday to do work together?"

:::

[Snape is living in kind of an awful hole, also he's clearly depressed. There was a half-open pack of cigarettes that never seemed to get depleted.]

[next housing application, Harry applies for independent housing and gets two rooms]

"The second room's for you, if you want," she said.

Snape was motionless. "A weak joke."

"No, really. I spend all week doing stuff and talking to people and thinking, this is nice, but it's not real, I can't tell them things. You're the only one I feel visible around."

"Is it any wonder, in your voluntary privation? If you're lonely, you have friends. This effort to replace them is mockable."

"They're out of step with me."

Snape laid a fist on the door to the room that could be hers. "We'd drive each other to madness."

He wanted it. Harry saw it, like a wolf glimpsing a limp in its prey. "Then move out again," he said, with a careless shake of his head. "But, look. Your room has its own door. If we're sick of each other, you can just treat this like a single unit, except for the bathroom."

Snape frowned at the door. "That's an unusual architectural choice."

Harry blushed. "I put it in."

"You – oh, of course," Snape said. Harry was surprised it hadn't been obvious to her. "Well. Then."

"Look at how many power outlets there are!" Harry said. "You're always kvetching and tripping over cords. And it's so close to the engineering quad." Dammit, he'd intended to dole these out strategically.

Snape's face was bewildered. "Potter."

"There's a working coffee machine from the previous tenant, there are hydrangeas near the entrance that will look beautiful in the summer, there's a, uh, sliding part for your keyboard under the desk in your room –"

"Potter, I get it," Snape repeated. His mouth twisted. "It's very generous of you."

"And – uh." Harry blinked. "Huh. You just said a nice thing about me."

[all the signs of saying no, and then] "Yes," Snape said abruptly.

:::

Author's note: A lot of the charm of this fic is the aesthetic – I'm a programmer and desperately charmed by Snape getting a computer science degree. I know he’s good with the conceptual stuff while also being a complete computer illiterate, there’s a lot of cursing, “Of _course_ I worked out the tree rebalancing algorithm on my walk back from class, but how do I get the _mouse_ to turn on???”

Other things I know about him:

When he’s on a deadline, Snape writes out all his code in a huge unlined notebook with a quill and then types it in at 25 words per minute, and it frequently compiles and runs as expected on the first try.

Since this doesn’t break the Statute of Secrecy, he makes no attempt to hide this from his much younger classmates. They fear him greatly.

He doesn’t have the foggiest idea how to dress like a Muggle in the late 90s (and refuses to take fashion cues from the twenty-somethings on campus) so he wears what he vaguely remembers being normal from his pre-Hogwarts childhood in the 60s. Wears robes at home, and then one day he’s sufficiently brainfucked by exam week that he forgets and just wears them to the test and no one bats an eye.

Snape writing a program on a floppy disk on a shitty desktop and then transferring it to the school computer lab to actually run it...

Surrounded by bubbly students one year before the dot com bubble bursts… taking classes with aspiring startup founders with stupid pitches…

Snape succumbing to despair about a bug, and chain smoking in his darkened room with his eyes glazed, bare feet propped up on his desk...

Snape doesn’t know about fire alarms until he sets one off this way.


	3. The Wordless Singing World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harriet Potter comes out in her fourth year, causing great disruption in the social fabric of Hogwarts and in her Potions professor's personal life.

"As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life."

— Mary Oliver

Harriet Potter came back to school for her fourth year dressed in male robes. They weren't particularly more elaborate than the normal robes she'd worn for her first three years – and you couldn't tell from a distance, robes weren't particularly gender differentiated – but the cut of her sleeves was masculine, the way they hugged her hips rather than flaring out was masculine, the way the collar shaped around her neck was masculine. It would have gone unnoticed by a Muggle. Perhaps it was just ignorance. Someone had made a mistake at a clothing shop. Or pulled a cruel joke.

But despite the nasty titters, she kept wearing them. She was wearing them when, pale, she walked to the front of the Great Hall after Dumbledore pulled her name out of the Goblet. Snape stared at her in loathing. ...

It was a horrible year. Karkaroff was there, plastering himself to Snape's side and desperate bids for help, collaboration. Every morning she got dressed and checked the mark on her arm, hoping fiercely for it to have faded. Once or twice she thought there might be visible backsliding, but it wasn't the case. The ink was flooding back as if some invisible tattooist were visiting her every night, filling it in again, layer by excruciating layer.

With the influx of new students, new relationships and rivalries, new drama, and the stupid uproar over the Triwizard Tournament, what Harriet Potter chose to hang on her ridiculous body should have mattered nothing. And yet, when she walked out to face the dragon of the first challenge with her hair trimmed close to her shapely head, it caused a furor that didn't die down for weeks.

Snape didn't recognize her at first. She knew the fourth challenger must be Potter, but the person walking onto the arena looked like a young boy. She had to use a telescoping spell to check that this was, in fact, Potter. She was wearing her flying robes – gold and red trim, fastened at the throat like a man. When the broom flew in to her hand from the dormitory, she bared her teeth in an ecstatic smile. Snape, momentarily, was lost in it.

Her flying was phenomenal for a student. Professionals would be recruiting her out of school. Snape stared and resented.

There were bloody articles in the Prophet about her haircut. It was insane, ridiculous, that the smallest motion the child made caused a flurry of attention. Snape made snide comments at her about it in class.

Then, at the Yule Ball, Potter came with a fifth year Hufflepuff, Adelaide Jennick.

"But Jennick is homosexual," Sinistra said in surprise, two chairs down to Snape's left. Everyone went quiet when Potter and Jennick glided onto the dance floor, looking very fine. They both wore men's dress robes, trimmed to fit their bodies. Potter's face was pale with nerves, but when Jennick bent her head down to whisper something into her ear, the tension shattered and she laughed, showing a row of pearly teeth.

"Apparently, so is Potter," Snape said. She found that the words came out without venom, or any kind of valence. She felt physically cold, abruptly, and reached for the wine.

She could not stop looking at Potter and Jennick. Many people couldn't. Delacour shone with beauty, and Krum's date continued to drop jaws, but the youngest couple among the Champions were the most eyecatching lot. Jennick led the first dance, and Potter the second. Potter's footwork was not graceful, but she had clearly practiced. Her hand on Jennick's waist was familiar. Jennick's smile was very warm.

At the staff meeting the next day, Snape growled, "What does she think she's playing at?"

"I think it's obvious, Severin." Dumbledore addressed the entire table. "Harry is declaring to the world that she prefers women."

Burbage chimed in, "The cut of her hair is very popular in gay Muggle women. As is dressing in male clothing. It's been apparent for quite some time."

Snape replied, surprising even herself with the raw hate in her voice, "I don't think it is appropriate of her to be making a spectacle of her sapphism – she is tarnishing the reputation of the school, and disrupting [social]."

McGonagall was icy. "Are you suggesting that the girl's choice of dress and date warrants _punishment_ , Professor Snape?"

"I'm saying that I recognize the girl for a fame-obsessed chit who, for all she pretends to dislikes it, consistently acts in a way that earns her more attention!"

Burbage said, "Well, it's a harder thing for an invert to find love than normal people, you know. If two people don't know if the other also shares the uncommon condition, they will not act on it. Being visibly different is one way to circumvent the problem. I'm inclined to be kind towards the child – she's lost enough."

Snape left the meeting seething. As if Potter needed more love. It seemed sometimes that the world thought Potter deserved everything – loving parents, a partner, acceptance for her sexual peculiarities – and grieved for her when she did not have these things. The universe flexed to accommodate Potter. It would heap riches on her.

:::

Events of the next few weeks belied Burbage's comment that the condition was uncommon.

It started with a sobbing Millicent Bulstrode. "I want to do that too," she said into a handkerchief. "Professor, last summer I met a girl from France and I think I fell in love, just a bit – I won't bore you with the details –" Snape hid her relief. "But watching Potter last night, I was so angry I could have hexed her. The cheeky bint! Dancing with Jennick in front of everyone!"

Then it was a nervy sixth year, Vanessa Osborne. "Could _I_ do that?" she said. "I'd much rather dress in men's robes and wear my hair short as well... do you think I'd get in much trouble, professor?"

Snape said with great exasperation, "There's nothing against the law or school regulation to don male clothing, Osborne. Do as you please, but know that right now it'll mark you as a homosexual. You might find yourself fielding interest from female students."

"Ye-es," Osborne said, and Snape saw that this was not at all an unpleasant outcome. "But do you think there will be, er, strong social consequences?"

Snape stared at her. How was this girl a Slytherin? “Of course there will be strong consequences, Osborne. You’ll damage your ability to leverage many male-female interaction templates to achieve your ends, as many of them are underpinned by the assumption of possible romantic interest. You will not be an eligible pureblood marriage match for anyone’s son, even if you have interest in marrying a man. Some of your friends and allies may be put off enough to leave you.”

Osborne raised her shoulders defiantly and slunk off.

Then it was Daphne Greengrass, who came in very red-faced. "Professor, I don't know what to do. There's something very wrong with me. I can't stop thinking about her." Snape gritted her teeth, thoroughly sick of these conversations, the sudden boldness with which her students were bringing tales of their idiotic crushes to her. "About Potter! She's utterly loathsome, you don't need to remind me, but..."

"Am I hearing that you are _attracted_ to Harriet Potter?" Snape said incredulously, when the silence sustained itself too long.

Looking vaguely deranged, Greengrass burst out, "I want to have _sex_ with Harriet Potter!" Snape thought she was losing her fucking mind. "I've never wanted to have sex with anyone before! Why does it have to be Potter? Her glasses are stupid! She's a dolt, she has no talent at anything except _Quidditch_! But every time I look at her hair I want to run my hands across it, I keep looking at the skin at her neck, and when she smiles I completely forget what I'm thinking. Oh, Professor Snape, I'm sorry, I know how contemptible you must find this, but I _can't_ talk to anyone about it! No one else feels this way!"

Cautiously, Snape said, "I can't deny that you're demonstrating a remarkable lack of taste, but I wouldn't go assuming that discovering homosexual tendencies is an experience unique to you. It's less unusual than you might think." Her heart pounded. Opaque as this was, it was the closest she'd come in years to revealing herself.

Thankfully, it went over Greengrass's head. "It would be suicidally stupid of me to openly join a club comprised solely of Potter and Jennick."

Snape opened her mouth, and then closed it.

The weekly staff meeting rolled by. Snape looked malevolently at Sprout when she arrived – it was _her_ student who had gone to the ball with Potter and caused Snape a week of headaches. Sprout looked very weary. "Well, that was a week. At least two of my students are getting a date out of it, but most of the others are reaping merely anguish."

Flitwick said, "Ah, I'm not the only one who's fielded a certain amount of student angst on the topic of... of..."

"A lot of romantic confusion has been stirred up," Sprout said.

They looked somewhat unlovingly at McGonagall when she walked in. "Do not start," she said. "I've seen the robes. I've seen the haircuts. I've seen the pins. I've gotten more than my fair share of complaints from parents."

"There's a shocking number of them," Sprout said. "Much more than I'd expect the student body to contain. I'd venture a guess throat a good number of them are just succumbing to a fad. Oh dear. If only it hadn't been Potter."

"Yes," Snape said savagely. "She does like using her fame to stir up chaos."

Sprout looked at her strangely. "I'm not talking about her fame, Severin. She's a very good looking girl, and she comported herself well at the dance. Unconventional as her aesthetic choices might be, they flatter her. I'm not surprised she's having an effect on some of the other girls."

Snape left the meeting in a foul mood, and was vicious at Potter that afternoon, enough that the girl's hands visibly shook with anger as she shaved slivers of yarrow root into her cauldron. Her classmates glared at Snape when they thought she wasn't looking. Still on Potter's side, eh? Well, maybe that was what you got when you were good-looking, a beloved Seeker, tragically orphaned, not visibly going anywhere in life. This was a girl who could freely afford to let her advantages fall to the ground.

She didn't know what McGonagall had meant by pins until she saw them on the two fifth year Hufflepuff girls who had apparently gotten together. Tittering, unfocused idiots who had only become more insufferable. One of them had cut her hair in imitation of Potter's, and they both wore a golden lightning bolt pin on their robes. In the course of the next week, Snape saw it on seven more people.

:::

[Snape takes out all her pent-up closeted wrath on Harry, and accuses her of attention-seeking, etc]

"I don't want to be especially strange," Potter burst out. She was flushed with passion, her skin glowed. "But when you do what you want – if you choose to openly be exactly what you know yourself to be – you cannot _help_ but be strange! I think it's impossible for anyone to be precisely themselves and not stand out!"

It was an odd outburst. Snape knew her eyes were wide. "Spare me these histrionics," she said.

[Harry accuses Snape of being unsympathetic because she doesn't know what it's like to go against the grain in this fundamental way. Snape, shaking with fury, says she _does_ know.]

[Everything freezes.]

[They don't talk about it for the next year.]

:::

[Then, Occlumency lessons. Harry deflects with Protego, sees sexual interest in her in Snape's mind.]

[Harry makes a pass – utterly terrified, but she still does it. Snape's motionless for too long, lets Harry touch her or kiss her and says, "Don't. I already have to obliviate you" (and also extract this memory into a pensieve herself, or ask Dumbledore to obliviate her).]

She saw the mutiny in Harry's eyes and fears Harry would resist, but then the girl said, "Then why not keep going?"

[H takes off her shirt, licks her nipples (!), runs her hand up and down S's flank. S tempted to touch H's breasts but doesn't dare, sits there like stone, aching with shock and awkwardness and pleasure]

[Doesn't take off Snape's pants but slides her thigh in between them as she kisses S, clearly a better kisser than her, how fucking humiliating, but S can't really focus on the humiliation, she's dazed by every kiss, she comes grinding against H's leg, hears herself – absurdly high pitched wail – never made that kind of noise while masturbating – ]

[Afterwards: they sit together with their backs to the dungeon wall, H's head drops to S's shoulder, very tentatively, and S can't bear to move. But she must.]

When Snape reached for her wand, Harry said, "What if -"

"No," Snape said. "He _cannot_ know. He must not see it in your mind or mine. You have no idea what we've risked by doing this. This was... unforgivably stupid. Reckless in the extreme."

A tiny smile tugged at Harry's mouth, and Snape saw what she thought of _that_. Curse the girl.

Harry said, "Find me. Afterwards. If we're both alive when it's over."

What a ridiculous notion.

"As if you'd be interested," Snape said shortly, knowing she was fishing and hating herself for it but unable to stop.

"I will be."

[Snape magics away every sign of what happened, H strips down takes off her underwear and scourgifys it, but before she does so Snape sees how _drenched_ it is, a great joyful shock tears through her body. It mattered to her maybe even more than the sex, this sight.]

"I'm ready," Harry said.

Snape had done a thousand wearying, unpleasant, necessary things in her life. Her hand shook.

"Obliviate!"

Harry got up from the ground, woozy despite the fall that Snape had cushioned wordlessly for her. "What happened?"

"You passed out." [S follows it up with a stream of invective, H's gaze snaps with resentment]

It was the longest half hour of her life. She dared not let it run shorter than that.

[Snape goes back to her room and drinks.]

Then, when she felt herself approach the threshold of losing lucidity, she prepared everything. She poured memory containment solution into a vial, held her wand to her head – a gesture that unstoppably evoked suicide – and plucked the memory out of her mind by the roots, more forcefully than she'd ever pulled. Every stray, semi-conscious sensation of yearning, every bit of lingering warmth on her skin and mouth, the reverberating shock, not fully processed yet, of knowing she'd aroused another human being. The excised memory came out a luminous strand of silver and coiled at the bottom of the vial.

The magical protections immediately snapped into place. Snape immediately let the vial drop onto the velvet inside of the box that lay open for it. The box itself snapped shut as soon as the vial landed in it, gleaming with curses of her own invention, ones that only she knew how to defuse. Trying to get around them would severely injure the burglar. If they got close enough, it would destroy the memory.

Severin Snape stared at it curiously, wondering what it might contain. A fool's game, she immediately knew – if it was a good idea to know what it was, she wouldn't have taken it out. She stopped her mind when it, quite naturally, tried to search for gaps in recent memory. It didn't matter.

But she was reckless with the drink – why was she drunk, anyway? – so she pricked her thumb and swiped the bead of blood against the lock of the box, which was a blank oval made of blood-drinker gold, to see what information her past self had seen fit to give her.

Her own script flickered into visibility on the surface of the lid:

_Open only if the war is over. Don't think about this too long._

Snape obeyed the directives of her past self, immediately turning her mind to other things, burying the box's existence under the strata of minutiae, immediately pruning the branches of her mind that wanted to speculate, follow the steps of implication. She banished the box to a bin of damaged brewing equipment under the table and stumbled back to her seat. She saw that there was cognac left in the bottle, and poured herself the rest. Alcohol did amazing things to memory storage.

She was drunk enough. Her vision was starting to waver. But she drank, throat burning, until the cognac was gone, to drown out the ghost of sweetness and grief that lingered in her limbs, the knowledge that whatever she had taken from herself, it was something irredeemably precious and rare.


	4. Some Secret Tree

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a painful thing to know in your mid twenties that all the defining events of your life lie in the past. When Snape stumbles into a another universe where his older self is engaged to Harry Potter, he discovers that it can be even more challenging to know that there are major turns left yet in his life, ones that could make him very happy – if he has to courage to accept being ridiculous, being open, being changed.
> 
> _His other self was there. Harry's Severus. The phrase made him want to gag. But that was the truth of it, that he wasn't Severus to anyone, and the other man – with an apothecary and a house and war awards and a ring on his hand – was._

Hogsmeade under the snow changed little enough from year to year that, when Snape walked into another reality, it took him half an hour to notice. The facade of one of the bookstores he'd visited two days ago was different. Newer wood, repainted sign – no, new sign altogether, fastened to the eaves by bronze hinges. He fingered his wand, suddenly on alert, and looked around, looking for anything else askew. Paranoid? Of course he was paranoid – the Dark Lord had been gone for eight years, but plenty of people who had a good idea of what his roster looked like could hold a grudge that long. Elaborate illusions or hallucinations weren't how he expected to be entrapped, but he'd seen odder.  
  
Snape had picked up on multiple minor discrepancies when he saw himself, walking out of a restaurant, arm wrapped around a dark-haired young man in a voluminous scarf.  
  
There were multiple shocking things about this. Snape stared hard for a minute, cataloguing every line and shadow of his other self's face. He was older, no doubt. Maybe in his forties, but a wizard's aging was variable, and it could have been decades more than that. The fundamental harshness of his bones had not changed – he was still an ugly bastard, all right. But the expression on his face was softer than Snape had ever seen in a mirror, and as he paused in front of a chocolate shop – his companion clearly trying to entice him into indulging in dessert – something made the natural grimness of his face crack open, and he smiled just a little, eyes creasing, looking relaxed in a way that resembled no one in his family, including himself.  
  
Heart thudding unpleasantly, Snape looked at the other man, and saw James Potter.  
  
By this point, they saw him too. It was his other self, sweeping a watchful gaze around, who had caught him staring. He pulled sharply at the sleeve of his companion, who turned to look. And then the three of them were staring at each other across the street, the snow falling between them. Snape could not look away. From the frontal angle it was clear he'd been mistaken. His other self's companion had an uncanny resemblance to the dead James Potter, but he was shorter, finer-boned. His glasses were clearly of Muggle make. And he was staring at Snape in open wonder and curiosity, where his other self – rightly – was glowering with suspicion.  
  
He almost walked away. It seemed he was in a different world – so what? He was free to pick and choose his mysteries. There was something sickening about the thought of talking to the Potter lookalike and his other self who could smile like that – whatever their lives were like, he didn't want to know. But he couldn't look away. The pair was now softly arguing, dark heads bent together, and they seemed to come to a decision. It was his other self that stalked across the street with his wand out, as Potter watched, hands stuffed into his pockets, forehead crinkled.  
  
"I seem," Snape said in a brazen, bored voice, "to have walked into a different world."  
  
His other self halted, expression intimidatingly cold. So this was what he looked like, with decades to hone a projection of ferocity. "Is that your story? I can think of ten likelier."  
  
Snape looked at the faintly stained hawthorn of the outstretched wand. "I have that one's twin," he said, and produced it.  
  
"Let me see it."  
  
"Your disbelief of my identity must be very great, if you think I'm idiotic enough to do that. Why shouldn't I be the distrustful one? I take a stroll out from drawing up lesson plans, and Fogg and Bartleby is an entirely different building, and the cut of people's robes has changed. You should be the one proving to _me_ that this isn't a trap."  
  
Hard black eyes on him. They were both Occluding furiously. "What was the first book you bought at Fogg and Bartleby?"  
  
He'd been eight. His mother had left him there for an hour while she shopped for herbs. She'd had enough change to buy him the thirdhand copy of a book of wizarding myths. "Casthorne's _The Giants of Time_."  
  
The other man slowly lowered his wand.  
  
Reading the signal, Potter jogged over, breathing white puffs into the air. "Told you, Severus. An impostor wouldn't _hunch_ the same way."  
  
Snape said, unintentionally wrathful, "And who is _this_?"  
  
"I'm Harry, Severus's fiance." The man's eyes were green. And, looking between them, Snape finally caught on. They were looking back, on edge, waiting for it.  
  
"You're marrying Harry _fucking_ Potter?"  
  
[They pulled into an alley. P wordlessly cast a series of sense-obfuscation spells]  
  
"So, what, then? I suppose _some_ variation of me has to be the one who makes the most moronic, indecent choices – marrying _Potter's_ brat – twenty years your junior – the spitting image of –"  
  
"I will _not_ tolerate your insulting him."  
  
Potter put an appeasing hand on his partner's arm. "You call me a brat all the time."  
  
"He doesn't even know you," his other self said coldly. His look was, unmistakably, that of hatred.  
  
"Stop being an angry berk," Potter said, catching the look. "Come on. Let's go back home."  
  
Panic swelled in Snape's chest. A minute ago he'd been thinking he could leave them alone. Now, he didn't know what his next move was if they abandoned him. Dumbledore, he supposed, with a flash of self-loathing – he was always someone's supplicant.  
  
To him, Potter said, "You don't know the coordinates, so I can Apparate you."  
  
His other self said, bitterly, "Am I not to be consulted when you take in strays?"  
  
"He's not a stray. He's you."  
  
"He is not."  
  
Snape said, nastily, "Am _I_ not to be consulted on whether I'm to be a guest? It's clear you've inherited your father's high-minded ways."  
  
Harry Potter closed his eyes. The slight diagonal roll of his eyes before he did so, and the gritted-amused press of the mouth, were Lily's. Strange, the mannerisms that carried through blood. Snape felt something tear through his chest when he realized he was privy to the knowledge, and Potter wasn't. As briefly as he'd gotten to love Lily, it was more than Potter had ever had. Ever would have.  
  
And whose fucking fault was that?  
  
His other self had started to speak, in a prim hostile voice that Snape already knew was the beginnings of permission, but he didn't stay to hear it. He bolted through the gap between his other self and the wall and burst out into the snowy, too-bright street again. Shoppers jabbered around him. In a hunted, unthinking way, he set his course for Hogwarts.  
  
Two blocks down, where buildings faded into patchy forest, a hand closed around his arm. "Wait," said Potter, before Snape caught him with a blow meant to torque him off into a bush. But Potter hadn't let go, so they both staggered off to the side, crashing into the snow banked to the side of the street.  
  
"Don't fucking touch me," Snape snarled, and gracelessly aimed a punch at Potter's chin. Potter caught it. He didn't seem alarmed at all.  
  
"Don't do that, especially around him – he'll maul you. Maybe worse than he'd go off on anyone else. Cripes, you're a self-hating bastard. Listen. Where exactly do you think you're going? The wards won't open for you, and even if you got in, you won't find Dumbledore. He's dead."  
  
The green eyes were grave. Snape hurled himself up, unable to bear the contact, or the overfamiliarity. He brushed the snow off his sleeves just to give his shaking hands something to do. "Dead," he repeated, hearing the inanity of it. The air prickled at his neck and face, the cold of a strange and hostile world where the living were dead, and the dead...  
  
"Come home with us," Potter said simply. "We'll take care of you. We'll figure out how to get you back."  
  
His other self was striding towards them, hands in pockets. "Are we quite done with antics? I have work to do, you know." His eyes narrowed when he took in the snow clotted onto their robes from tussling, but he said nothing.  
  
"I'll go," Snape said to Potter, sounding mumblier and more uncertain than he'd meant to.  
  
" _How_ gracious," said his other self.  
  
Potter, apparently losing patience, grabbed one arm each and Apparated out, heaving them home.  
  
:::  
  
Snape sat alone in the house and brooded.  
  
His other self had left with a curt excuse almost immediately after coming home, switching out his robes. Potter had left rather less curtly after setting him up in the guest bedroom with fresh bedding, towels, and a change of clothes (that Snape suspected his other self hadn't authorized). "There's food in the fridge if you're hungry –"  
  
"I'm not," Snape said. A _fridge_? "There's no need to smother me."  
  
Potter seemed unperturbed by his rudeness. "Sure. I'm off to update my friends on your situation – one of them is a great researcher, if anyone can figure out how to get you back, it's her. And, ah, don't leave the house. We've got some powerful wards. You won't be able to get back in, and might get hurt trying."  
  
"Why the paranoia?"  
  
"We get paparazzi and assassins every once in a while," Potter said without batting a lash. "But the garden's fine to explore. I'll be back by dinner time."  
  
Snape still wasn't sure how they'd come in, but the view from the windows looked out on a rather nice Muggle neighborhood. He stalked around, feeling like a trapped animal. It was a nice fucking house. When he went to the guest bedroom and sat down, the mattress had a perfect amount of yield. The bookshelves were mahogany, with the kind of elegant finish he'd always admired in richer people's offices. They held Potions journals, botany references, manuals on some genres of magic that skirted Dark, a thick tome on Parseltongue. Interleaved between what were obviously his picks: Muggle thrillers, international poetry anthologies, piano books for beginning and intermediate students. He fingered the spines of the latter, obscurely troubled. He couldn't tell if they were his or Potter's.  
  
Two doors were locked to him. One was a brewing room – he could tell by the whiff of dried dragon's blood that was the smelliest ingredient in any advanced potioneer's shelf, apparent even from the outside. The other, he surmised, was the bedroom. Their bedroom. He walked away from it, unconsciously curling his toes into the carpeting. He stopped when he realized, and then dug them in once again, probing. He could sense the rich, subtle buzz of magic in the fibers, keeping it clean and soft.  
  
So this is what marrying into pureblood money got you. Snape stormed out in the garden. The door opened for him and clicked gently shut when he'd gone through, denying him the satisfaction of slamming it. There were two rocking chairs outside. One had a book straddling the armrest page-down, keeping its place. That was his chair, then. He picked it up and set it aside on the end table beside it, losing the position. He noted, with some annoyance, that it was a Muggle thriller. He hadn't known he liked those.  
  
He sat, rocking himself just a little bit with his toe, looking at the flowers and herbs springing from the soil. Some – like the fanged geranium – were carefully cordoned off from the rest. Some were, as far as he could tell, perfectly normal flowers. Roses burst unseasonably from the hedge. The air was warm – cooler than it was indoors, but much warmer than real weather. If he squinted and really looked, he could just about catch the soap-bubble edge of magic that kept the temperature pleasant.  
  
It was a remarkably nice place to sit. The back of the chair conformed pleasantly to the curve of his spine. The end table was perfectly placed for him to reach out for a cup of tea, if one had been placed there. (In fact, he could see the faint superposition of circular water stains, where such a cup had been placed and retrieved many times.) He fought the relaxation. This was not his garden, or his life, and he didn't want it to be.  
  
The door opened behind him. "There he is," said Potter.  
  
Snape turned in his chair and aimed a scowl at Potter – and two guests. They were both gawping at him. One woman and one man, about Potter's age.  
  
"Wow," said the man, almost reverently. "You weren't joking."  
  
Snape said, "Aspiring to start a zoo in your house? You and your fiance are not sufficiently fascinating?"  
  
"That's _eerie_ ," the woman breathed. "Tell me everything about how you got here."  
  
Potter said, swiftly, "These are my friends, Ron and Hermione. I suggest you give Hermione actually helpful answers to whatever she asks. She's your best chance at getting back home. Why don't you talk out here while Ron and I make dinner? Hermione, thanks for doing this." Then he dragged the still-staring redhead back indoors while Hermione settled into the other chair and launched into an interrogation, quill in hand.  
  
Halfway through, after a particularly uncooperative bout of personal questioning, she got up and summoned Potter back into the garden. "Where's Sn – your, uh – where's Severus?"  
  
"In his London apothecary," said Potter. He was wearing an apron, and there was a smear of cooking oil on his glasses. Snape tried not to stare at this parodic hallucination of domesticity. "There's not much reason for him to be in it on a Saturday, but I think it'll do him some good to terrorize his assistants."  
  
"Call him back," said Hermione. "I need to check what the divergence between our realities are, and he's not answering any questions about his personal life."  
  
His other self clearly hadn't gotten the terrorizing out of his system when he returned. His scowl deepened when he saw Snape in his chair, but with unexpected grace he took the other one. "Let's start with the basics," he said, casting a privacy spell around them.  
  
Where did you grow up? When did da move out? What was your first spell? When was the first, illicit cigarette? Neither of them spoke of Lily. What was your first potion? Your first piece of illegal magic? Who were your House dormmates? Who was your Transfigurations partner during fifth year? Sixth?  
  
They were both tense, speaking in low voices even with the sound barrier spell. Whenever they thought they found a mismatch – which was rare – his other self took a note in familiar, slanted handwriting.   
  
Who was the first person you killed? Tortured? Poisoned? What village was your first Death Eater raid in? What potion did you first brew for the Dark Lord? Who was the first person he killed in front of you? Who was the last?  
  
Who walked free after He fell? Who didn't? Whose gaze could you meet afterwards?  
  
What was the salary Dumbledore offered you when you started teaching? Who was the top-scoring student in your first student cohort? What was the first pregnancy crisis you had to deal with as Head of House?  
  
They stopped, exhausted, after more than an hour had passed. His other self took down the sound barrier and hoarsely called Hermione back in.  
  
"Minutiae," he said shortly, showing her the list. "We disagree on whether one of our classmates transferred to Durmstrang in fifth or sixth year. On how much our first raise was. On whether a Death Eater colleague was murdered on the Dark Lord's command, or by a jealous peer. All of this could just as easily be a mistake of memory – probably mine. There is no significant difference between our worlds."  
  
Snape reeled. It hadn't occurred to him that Potter's friend would know that he'd been a Death Eater. That meant that _Potter_ knew. Potter, whose parents had died by the Dark Lord's wand. He knew, and he'd decided to marry him anyway.  
  
"Blood test?" Hermione said, conjuring a small glass and setting it on the table.  
  
"Blood and magic," said his other self. He nicked his thumb with magic and pressed it against the inside of the glass.  
  
Snape did the same. He watched the blood trickle down the sides and meet at the middle. Both streaks had a thin, shimmering film on top. The blood mingled; the film did not.  
  
Hermione sighed. Her expression was that of naked satisfaction of curiosity in the face of truth. "You're not from the past."  
  
The door opened. Ron popped his head in and said, "Dinner's ready."  
  
His other self didn't move. "Another world, then?"  
  
"A very close one. Just a minute, Ron."  
  
"What's the practical difference?"  
  
["It means that, upon returning, his universe will move without disrupting the motion of ours."]  
  
His other self went silent.  
  
Ron said, brightly, "Seriously, the roast beef is excellent. Would you hurry?"  
  
There were five seats set at a four-person table, two chairs awkwardly nestled together where there normally would have been one. Potter had stripped out of his apron, and his shirt sleeves were rucked up to his elbows. Snape felt an entirely unwanted pang of interest at the sight of his forearms – muscled, and surprisingly hairy – and looked away.  
  
"We'll take these," Hermione said hastily, sliding out the pair of too-close chairs.  
  
Ron pointed his wand at the table and widened it by a foot, rattling cutlery and empty plates. The tablecloth must have been caught at one end of it, because it jerked and clung to one side, leaving the other end exposed. Everyone paused to stare awkwardly at the surface. Snape felt a rather mean smile pulling at his mouth, and found that he was enjoying himself for the first time that day.  
  
Then his gaze happened to fall on Potter, who was looking back at him with a helplessly amused expression, glasses still stained with grease. Snape felt his smile disappear. He pulled out the chair adjacent to Hermione's and sat down.  
  
Dinner featured greens liberally drowned in a lemony vinaigrette that Snape didn't recognize but took a liking to immediately. Next to the salad was a small, incongruous plate of raw, pink fish. His other self, who was sitting across him at the uncovered end of the table, reached out with a fork to snag a slice. "I will not be bribed," he said warningly to Potter. There was an undercurrent of warmth in his voice that it took Snape a few seconds to process.  
  
"If you say so," Potter said, and reached out to affectionately brush his fiance's ringed hand as it retreated. His friends were staring rather fixedly at their food. The redhead's chewing was determined, almost meditative.  
  
"Engaged long?" Snape said, a little more loudly than he needed to.  
  
No one jumped to answer, exactly. "Six months," answered Potter. His look at Snape this time was unamused.  
  
"I'm glad," Snape drawled, gaze sweeping around the kitchen before landing on his other self, "that you've come all this way in life to live like a middle-class Muggle."  
  
Ron said, " _Wow_!", and set down his glass of water. Now he seemed like the only person who was enjoying himself.  
  
Hermione's hand had crept up as if to cover her mouth, but it hadn't quite gotten there. Her eyes were on his other self, who said mildly, "Reckless words from someone who's closer to the trough of his life than I am. If your main point of criticism is that I have a refrigerator, then I say this has more to do with your parochial views than my wrong turns."  
  
Snape found that he was breathless with anger without quite understanding why. "I think my main point of criticism is really that you've gone and shacked up with a poof – for money? A desperate career move? – after murdering his parents. Which, I hope, everyone at this table knows?"  
  
There was a tiny squeak from Hermione. To his right, there was a small clatter – Potter putting down a utensil, a motion that Ron was mirroring, rather more slowly. Snape stared fixedly into the white, enraged face of his other self, finding it strangely difficult to look at Potter.  
  
"Right," Potter said flatly. "I forgot, you're difficult."  
  
"You forgot?" Ron muttered. He was blotchy with anger, an unfortunate complexion that Snape shared. Hermione visibly kicked him under the table.  
  
Snape swept his audience with a malicious smile without ever quite meeting Potter's eyes. "Should I be sent to my room now?" he said. There was no way Potter wouldn't excuse him. He could leave them all marinading in this excruciating silence.  
  
"Perhaps you," Potter started to say, and was cut off by his other self: "No, I think this is going splendidly. Let's finish dinner; we deserve to subject ourselves to each other." His eyes, fixed on Snape, were still burning with rage.  
  
"Disagree," said Ron, springing up. "Mate, sorry to leave you in this bind, but I can't stand another minute of this. Thanks for dinner, it was excellent. You're always welcome at our flat if you need a break from this madhouse. Two of them, fucking hell."  
  
Hermione dabbed her mouth with her napkin and stood up also. "Um. I'll be back." She didn't sound happy about this. She looked at Snape with her brows pinched together and said, "Be less of an utter arse when I do, will you?"  
  
Snape looked around after they left, feeling the savage satisfaction of knowing he was the least miserable person in the room. "Well! I'm glad to see there aren't any preexisting strains in your relationship –"  
  
"Please get out of my kitchen," Potter said, without looking at him.  
  
Snape retreated to the guest bedroom. His hosts barely managed to throw up a silencing spell before the shouting started.  
  
:::  
  
When he woke up, he found that he didn't have the nerve to venture out for breakfast. He lay on the wonderfully plush mattress, staring at specks of dust traversing the sunbeam from the window, despising himself for his cowardice. Generally despising himself, really. He had no idea what to expect when someone knocked on his door.  
  
"Come in," he said, listlessly.  
  
It was Potter, carrying a plate of eggs and toast. "Morning," he said, sitting down at the foot of the bed. His hair was damp from the shower. The shell of his ear gleamed pinkly in the sun. Snape glimpsed the crescent of a recent hickey on his elegant neck and looked away, with a deep stomach-thrill of discomfort. He'd never slept with a man before. With anyone. And it had been years since he'd fastened even secret attention on a specific person. Potter, sitting at the foot of his bed, glowed with specificity. Snape pretended to look at the food while staring at the strong forearm tapering to an almost delicate wrist. His imagination kept trying to fill the gaps of what Potter must have been up to in bed last night.   
  
"So," he said, blank with panic, unable to quite meet Potter's eyes.  
  
"I have food for you, but only if you're done making yourself miserable."  
  
"I seem to recall making multiple people miserable."  
  
Was that _his_ eyebrow arch on Potter's face? "I guarantee you you're the unhappiest person out of all the people who were at dinner last night."  
  
He picked at the sleeves of his borrowed shirt in affected boredom. "I'm quite content, so if that's true, perhaps I've done you all a favor? Everyone is ecstatic at the disruption of what looked like a rather delicate social fabric?"  
  
"Ron and Hermione and I have been best friends for thirteen years," Potter said dryly. "They're not going to run off screaming because I'm marrying someone they're not fond of."  
  
"Even a murderer and an ex-terrorist?"  
  
"Everyone at that table has killed someone. As for terrorism – I've spent my fair share of months on the run setting fire to Death Eater safe houses and disrupting Ministry operations. I'd argue that counts."  
  
Snape found himself at loss.  
  
Taking advantage of the lull, Potter waggled the plate at him. The bacon slid perilously. "Peace?"  
  
"I'm a Slytherin, I don't come that cheap."  
  
"How about I throw in some free housing?" Potter said. "Clothing and laundry as well. Answers to the questions you clearly have about this future? And social entertainment? You seemed glad to help yourself to it last night, at our expense?"  
  
Was Potter actually fun to banter with, or was he going insane? He was wearing a wry little smile that was reminiscent of neither parent. A pre-smile, actually, and just at one corner of the mouth. The kind of expression that provoked, in Snape, a foreign impulse to say something to push it into a real smile. He flinched away from it.  
  
"Very well," he said shortly. He took the plate. "Tell me about the arson and terrorism."  
  
"Voldemort came back when I was eleven," Potter said, ignoring Snape's flinch. "He managed to claw his way back into actual corporeality when I was fourteen..."  
  
He went into some detail about the Dark Lord's weaknesses and plans, clearly expecting Snape to make use of the information when he went back to his world. "Severus didn't get caught out as a spy until I was seventeen," he said. "Obviously he'll know more useful things than I do about how to navigate that well. You could ask him. Politely."  
  
Snape made a neutral noise. Potter otherwise wasn't broaching the topic of the clear antagonism between the two Snapes. That unnerved him a little.   
  
...  
  
When he emerged from his room into the living room, Hermione was there with several dozen books stacked on the coffee table. They bristled with bookmarks like the fletching in a quiver of arrows. "I think I've narrowed it down," she said, seeming pleased with herself.  
  
His other self was there. Harry's Severus. The phrase made him want to gag. But that was the truth of it, that he wasn't Severus to anyone, and the other man – with an apothecary and a house and war awards and a ring on his hand – was.  
  
Severus lifted his graying head and looked at him. And Snape had the realization, in a horrified nonverbal flash compressed into a fraction of a second:  
  
These days, the times he felt best were when he accessed a part of himself that wasn't trapped and stunted by reliving memories of a time when he hadn't been – of the two or three years after he'd been taken seriously as a Death Eater, before he'd turned sides. Once, he'd been poised and valued. On his way up. He'd sliced people up less for the pleasure of it than for the pleasure of the fear and admiration of his peers. Once he had dueled an Auror twice his age, forcing him step by step back into a burning house, as the Dark Lord himself watched. He still dreamt about that. He'd never breathed a word about it to anyone, but they were some of the best dreams in his life. And this other man, who had married the son of two people he'd gotten killed in his service – his worship – of that man, knew this about him.  
  
Severus said, "If you do not cooperate with this young woman to find a way to return to your reality, I will immobilize you and force feed you Nicolaou's effusion of liquid fire. Do you doubt that I mean this?"  
  
"Not at all. Do give me a minute," Snape said, with controlled venom, and veered into a bathroom to discreetly retch.  
  
He brushed his teeth, returned, and was civil to Hermione. Barren and monotonous as his life was, he wanted nothing more than to return home.  
  
:::  
  
Five days passed, during which he spoke to no one unless necessary. He went through the books Hermione had brought, trying to find solutions. She joined him twice, but was visibly tired and didn't get very far – whatever her day job was, it took a lot out of her. One night, the other two people in the house forgot to put up silencing spells, and he was subjected to half an hour of thumping.  
  
Their furniture was sturdy. It was not a lot of noise. Really, he had to pitch his hearing to catch it.  
  
Which he did, for some reason – he hated himself for it. Several times, someone moaned. Snape wasn't sure who it was. He didn't know what sorts of noises he would make in bed, with a partner he'd been with for years.  
  
On his sixth afternoon at the household, he capitulated, miserable with boredom. When he heard someone come home, he crept out of his room to join them. It was Potter, whose eyes crinkled into a smile when he saw Snape. That still pissed him off, but with an attendant lurch in his chest. "It's the weekend!" Potter said inanely. "Want to help me cook?"  
  
Snape found himself agreeing, stiltedly. Potter started pulling pots and pans, cutting boards and colanders. "I'm making curry tonight," he said, manually retrieving vegetables from the fridge. "And fish – I got some flounder on the way home, couldn't help myself. Mind gutting it?"  
  
He didn't, although he was unused to gutting fish. "You cook the Muggle way," he observed, watching Potter julienne some carrots for a salad.  
  
"It's how I was taught," said Potter. "And I like to do something that doesn't involve my wand at all, every once in a while."  
  
"Ah. Your aunt's household." He hadn't thought about the baby in years. He didn't like to. Seven years old, he supposed, and learning to cook like a Muggle. God, seven years old. "When did you get involved with your fiance?" He almost phrased it more rudely, but he was sufficiently starved of conversation that he decided to hold off on antagonizing his host.  
  
"Erm," said Potter, giving him a sidelong glance. "I was almost seventeen."  
  
His knife stilled on the cutting board. "You were still in school."  
  
"No, I told you about this, I was on the run. You weren't my teacher."  
  
"You were still a child."  
  
"Age of consent is sixteen."  
  
He hadn't heard of that term before, but it was easy enough to understand what it was. "Is that Muggle law? No one gives a damn."  
  
Potter said, "All right. Whatever wizarding law was, I didn't give a damn about it either. It can't be that restrictive, I know a pureblood who got married in their fifth year."  
  
Snape lopped off the flounder's head. This was a point. "Beginning a fling with a Death Eater twice your age while on the run. How romantic."  
  
"You know what? It kind of was," said Potter. "We didn't get much time alone together – too busy – but when we did, it was a refuge away from everything else. I knew I might die very soon, and every second with him felt right. Everything was going to shit and I was marching through it with my head screwed on right... no, I'm not conveying this well at all. Hmm. It was a unique time."  
  
He couldn't imagine it.

....

[Snape expresses appreciation for Hermione's research. She's flushed with pleasure]

"Funny," said Ron, in a casual way. "When we were in school, you wouldn't give her efforts a glance. I guess it wasn't out of genuine scorn, eh?"

"Don't project onto me," Snape said disdainfully. "Whatever issue you have is not with me."

"It is, though. You're still being a total git to your students, aren't you?"

He sneered. "Been burning to confront him about this, haven't you? Except you're not brave enough to take it up with the man himself, so you go caterwauling to take it out on a related party at the first opportunity."

Ron's fingers dug into the top rail of the chair in front of him. "That's fucking rich is what it is. Isn't that what you did with James Potter and his son?"

"Ron," Hermione said, but without much force. Her gaze, too, was bitter. Her hands trailed off the books lying open on the table as she turned to face them.

Snape could feel his heart thud in his ribcage. "I can't seem to hammer it into your skull that I'm not the man you have an issue with. From the way you're carrying on about this, I surmise that you haven't brought up these grievances to your friend’s betrothed, even though Potter's been involved with him for seven years. Too scared? Of what? You are an adult now – you're on level footing but perhaps don't feel like it, because he was your teacher for so long. Or because you haven't come into adulthood properly." Watching Ron's eyes, he pressed in for the kill. "Or perhaps you're afraid that, if you cause a rift, it will be him that your friend chooses, and not you."

The silence was deathly. Snape felt himself smile, and knew it wasn't a nice one. He felt duel-tense, watching both their faces, and _knowing_ he’d gotten it right. At least partially. That itself was incredible – Potter and his alter were so – close – that his best friends felt threatened by it. There was... satisfaction at that, a great deal of it, but also – what felt like grief –

In alarm, he pushed that away – perhaps for later examination – as Hermione said, "You missed an option. We don't cause a rift because we love him and don't want to make him choose at all." She inhaled, watching him closely. "Do you – know what that's like?"

Someone at the door said, "Pardon me."

It was Severus. Everyone went silent. He pursed his lips, scanning the room

"Granger. Weasley. I think perhaps this is a good time to have a talk in the garden."

"Is it?" said Weasley tightly. His face was still flushed with anger.

"Yes." Severus's voice was implacable.

They traipsed into the garden, Snape forgotten. He tried not to resent it for a few minutes, and then gave into it. He was not some kind of shadow. He was just as real as Severus was, he had his own life goddamned life, but the only way Ron and Hermione seemed to see him was as a mirror into Severus –

What Ron said came to him again, that this was how he'd treated Harry. Would treat Harry. And although he hadn't given much thought to how he'd treat the boy once he entered Hogwarts – he mostly felt dread at the idea and avoided thinking about it when the topic surfaced in his mind, it wasn't near enough that he had to make plans, form intentions – he knew Ron was right. Ron knew some things about his psyche that he himself didn't. All these people did.

Snape massaged the bridge of his nose and went to make a cup of tea.

Harry arrived home a quarter hour later. "Oh, hello," he said. "Ron and Hermione not here yet?"

"They're in the garden," said Snape. "Talking to your fiance."

Harry looked alarmed, and took a few steps to peer through the door. The three were sitting out on the grass on conjured chairs. No noise carried, but Ron and Hermione – the ones facing the door – were wearing civil, if strained, expressions. "Oh dear. How long have they been in there?"

"Twenty minutes."

Harry swore. Snape cautiously put a hand on his shoulder.

[They all come out of the garden, it's not discussed what they said, but Ron and Hermione look thoughtful. Severus has clearly explained something about himself to them. They're nicer to Snape, though, which drives him crazy.]

:::

Rough sketch of the rest of the story:

  
A week passes, they're looking for a solution, S familiarizes himself with H/S's life, R/HG come to visit (and goggle), H digs for information as if for baby photos

Tensions between S1 and S2 ease. Severus has been oscillating between 'does H want a younger model' and 'that guy is disgusting, no way I'm threatened' on top of 'I fucking hate who I was'. Snape asks sarcastically if Severus has any gems, obviously he's fine sitting in smug fucking judgment. S2 says, basically, be a different person, but you can't, yet. Snape says, are you really more interested in fucking yourself (me) over than improving life for a version of yourself? Because if you are, you can't have changed that much. This one lands. Severus gives real advice.

Some notes on this tension:

  * Snape: Coming to terms with the fact that his life is not static, that there are more defining events of his life left, that he is allowed to grow. What does the state of denial look like? Rejection of S2 as himself, contempt for their life, rumination on the past. What does the state of acceptance look like? Asking for advice, allowing himself to want what Severus has. Allowing himself to want. Entertaining ideas about working somewhere else, moving somewhere else. What's the inflection point? When he wakes up next to Harry, I think. And realizes – this is nice, nicer than the bad things are bad. He's allowed to want this. This is, actually, empirically attainable.  
  

  * Severus: Accepting that past-him is someone deserving of forgiveness and affection. The transition looks like: facilitating Snape getting it. Inflection point is pretty subtle, don't know if it'll make it into the story: Harry says something indulgent to Snape. Severus is watching from across the room, watching himself soften under that kindness.



Snape is... falling for Harry. At some point, Severus comes by and tersely informs Snape that he's ready to share. Snape is on the verge of throwing a hissy fit about this when Severus says, "And don't throw a hissy fit, you clearly want this, just go for it instead of ruining everything, idiot."

The sex is, obviously, great. Harry knows what Snape likes and takes great pleasure in blowing his mind.

They find 90% of a solution. It's called 'walking the fae road', where to go back you have to lose something irreplaceable and get something irreplaceable.

"Tricky. You didn't come here with anything, did you? You were just on the way to Hogsmeade."

Snape said, "That part's taken care of."

Hermione's brows were furrowed. "You lost something? What is it? Are you sure it's irreplaceable? As in, something that would count by the standards of fae magic?"

"Don't ask stupid questions," Snape said curtly. "If I say I did, then I did."

Hermione stared at him for another few seconds, and then flushed deeply. He watched her just about keep from looking at Harry and Severus. "Oh. Okay. Um, let's talk about getting some irreplaceable. That's easier, but still kind of tricky. It has to [requirements]"

Severus pulled his ring off his finger and rolled it across the table.

"Oh!" said Hermione, astonished. "You can't!"

Severus said, "Would something less than serve?"

Snape goes back on the fae road. He's not wearing the ring – it's on a chain around his neck, under his shirt. Hermione presses a thermos of cocoa into his hand. Harry squeezes his hand. Snape doesn't dare look back.


	5. The Sapling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prequel to Some Secret Tree (Ch 4), although the two can be read independently. In the last years of the war, Snape finds a new master.

Two perimeter alarms went off. It was Harry's watch.

[Harry goes searching and almost trips over Snape]

"I'm completely sozzled," Snape said, curling his hands in Harry's collar. Harry jerked his wand up, alarmed. "Big mistake."

"Merlin, you aren't kidding," Harry said, wrinkling his nose at the stench of whiskey. He was talking on autopilot. He found that his hands had closed around Snape's waist. He was surprisingly skinny. "What the hell happened? Can you afford to be here?"

"Got caught," Snape said simply, and then laughed. Harry had never seen him laugh before. He looked deranged. "Ten-hop Apparation chase. After Lyle Yaxley put me under Cruciatus. Led him on a merry chase around the Scottish highlands and then ambushed him halfway to Wales. Tore him to pieces and scattered them over the cliffside for the vultures –"

"Snape –" Harry shook him. It was horrible how easy it was to shake him, he felt like a rag doll in Harry's hands. That was wrong. "Snape, what do you mean by _got caught?_ "

Harry was close enough to Snape's face to see the glitter of stars reflected in his eyes. He was Occluding, just in case, but he sensed no attempted intrusion. If this was a trick on Voldemort's part, it didn't involve mind magic. "Yaxley's partner got away, and she knew. _He_ sent summons, which I ignored. So he knows, Potter. I knew the next time he used the Mark, it wouldn't be to call. Look at this –"

He produced his arm. Harry was unable to stop from crying out in horror.

Where the Mark had been, the skin was crisped a horrible, dead-looking gray, most of the forearm gone.

"Complete tissue death," Snape rasped. He was swaying. "Nothing else would do. You know the spell."

"It's one of yours."

"So you know," Snape said, sinking to his knees, "that I'm loyal."

Harry went down with him, supporting him by the shoulders. "That hasn't been in question for some time."

Snape leaned forward and kissed him. Harry's mouth parted a little in pure shock, and became one half of a seal. Snape's mouth was acrid. He was a horrible kisser, clumsy and aggressive.

Harry kissed him back. He never hesitated.

"That wasn't," Snape murmured, drunken confusion. "That's not what I expected you –"

Harry kissed him again, licking the whiskey out of his mouth. Snape let out a noise, a kind of hoarse mewl, that went straight to Harry's groin. Every line of Snape was gaunt and ugly with anger, and Harry had never wanted to fuck anyone so much in his life. Holy shit, I'm _gay_ , he thought. It was the least astounding thing occupying his mind at the moment. He cupped Snape's face to nip at his lips, then nuzzle their mouths together. Snape made the noise again, lower-pitched.

"I'm on watch," Harry said breathlessly. "I can't do this, and also, fuck, your arm."

"Shut up for a second about the arm," Snape said, abruptly so tetchy and domineering that they might have been in a classroom again. Except for the dark, uncontrolled slur of his voice. Harry's cock twitched. "I need to talk to you about debts."

"What about debts?" This was awful, Snape doing the voice just made Harry want to kiss him again. He must be going bonkers. First of all, that voice belonged to an arsehole, in his arsehole domain. Second, holy hell, he could not afford to be a horny idiot right now. He couldn't.

"All my debts," Snape was saying. His eyes were sunken into his skull. Harry found himself brushing lank strands of hair out of the way, tucking them behind Snape's ear. "To Dumbledore, and your parents. You've inherited them. My service, you've inherited." He hiccuped with laughter, mocking and hateful. "I'm your man. But I'm useless."

"You're not useless," Harry said. "You're one of the cleverest men I know, an accomplished potioneer, you're fucking amazing in a duel. Don't fucking call yourself useless."

"Potter, I'm left handed."

Harry stopped. He reviewed his memory of Potions classes, of watching Snape work magic. This was true.

"The flesh killing spell is Dark," said Snape. "Very dark. It defies healing. It defies regeneration. That's the only way I could get it off for good on such short notice. Normal healing would bring it back. My flesh remembers being connected to him, it's been more than half my life. Perhaps a very accomplished prosthetician might be able to do something for me."

But there was no way to get him to one. Not safely.

He looked down again at the awful gray ruins of Snape's left arm. "Will you live?"

"Oh, yes," Snape said, with a grim chuckle. "It's not meant to kill. There's no blood loss, no encroaching necrosis. But my hand is useless without the nerves and muscles that used to route through the arm."

"Does it hurt?"

Snape's eyes were drugged, glassy. "Horribly. Broke into a Muggle bar and downed half of the first bottle I grabbed before I worked up to blasting it off."

"Let me wake up Ron, he's our best healer, and we'll do what we can for you," Harry said.

"You're not hearing me," Snape said, angrily, grabbing Harry by the shoulder with his good hand. _Ow_. The man had a strong grip. "There's no point. I'm no good for your cause. I can't fight, I can't brew. The magical lore I know best, that I can teach you, you won't touch."

"You nutter, I'm not going to send you off into the night without healing because we can't make use of you," Harry said fiercely. "Merlin, there's no reasoning with you right now. Come _on_ , stop wasting time, let's get you in the medical tent."

"And then what?" Snape's voice was too intense. "And then what do you do with me?"

"We'll try to set you up with a new identity and put you in Australia or something," Harry said. "Somewhere you'll be safe."

He'd let his guard down. Snape was in his mind, whatever delicacy he normally had about intruding gone. All panicked rummaging, a tornado without a warrant. As Snape himself had taught him a year ago, Harry froze his mind, watching himself be invaded, pouring more and more of himself into the watching until there was no part being watched.

" _Prick_ ," he said angrily. He'd stumbled back onto the grass into a crouch, and his wand was out. "If that was a trick to get in my head, you didn't have to fucking kiss me."

"You're the first..." Snape said, and toppled sideways, onto his good arm. "Very well. Hurry up with it."

:::

His arm was encased in a clear glass – really an anaesthetic tincture frozen into the shape of his arm. Normally it would wear off within hours, but there was no metabolism consuming it. It was difficult but not impossible to brew, and the ingredients were common. It was a good holding solution.

"I'm staying," Snape said, without looking at him.

Harry sat down. "I thought you didn't have anything to offer the resistance."

"Don't be an unimaginative pillock, Potter," Snape said shortly. "I'm a brilliant wizard. I still have much to offer, even without the ability to perform magic directly."

"Good to see your ego is intact." Snape gave him a savage glare. "Um, sir."

Snape did not look placated in the least. Harry continued, "I didn't offer to put you in Australia because I thought you weren't an asset. I offered because it seemed like you wanted out."

Snape's expression dripped disdain. "And, so, when someone wants out of a war, they get out? Is that how it works for you? Can you fuck off to Australia when you please?"

"I don't think that's how it works for me," Harry said.

Snape sneered. "Because you're special?"

Harry gritted his teeth. "Yeah. I am. If you can say you're brilliant, because you are, then I can say I'm special, because I am. Sir."

Snape's eyes glittered with malice. He drew in a breath, suddenly looking very alive. Harry almost liked seeing it, but he didn't have the energy for a fight, and also, wanted a shot at talking about the kiss. He cut in, "You should be able to get out if you want to. You've served long enough, and suffered for it. And even if you hadn't, I don't think we should be in the business of forcing people who joined up to stay until we spend them to death. They shouldn't have to fight in something they don't believe in."

"That's not how armies work, you stupid boy."

"Then I guess we aren't an army."

Snape narrowed his eyes. "Dumbledore didn't operate this way."

Harry shrugged, feeling increasingly mulish. So much for trying to get Snape to kiss him again. (Holy hell, how was that one of his goals here?) Every word coming out of his mouth seemed to further cement Snape's opinion of him as an idiot. Lying to please Snape never occurred to him. "Then I guess I'm not Dumbledore."

"Obviously," Snape spat. Struggling with what looked like disgust, he looked off to the side.

Harry sighed. He was, abruptly, very tired. He'd been turning around being gay last night while falling asleep. It had been exhilarating, an unsullied discovery about himself that had nothing to do with the parts of himself to do with, for instance, poisoning the air of a Death Eater meeting house last week and blockading the entrances. Now the shell deflated. It meant nothing. He liked men, so what? It wasn't as if he could strike something up with someone, not now. Everyone thought he was still with Ginny, waiting to be with Ginny, and the guilty deception had become a convenient one. It was a bad idea.

It might not be a bad idea with Snape. Snape wouldn't moon, or be indiscreet. Snape wasn't someone who'd make Harry lose his head. Snape would let Harry suck his cock and kick him out of his tent before anything got awkward, and that would be bloody wonderful.

"Argh," Harry said out loud, reviewing what he'd just thought. Snape looked at him sharply. "Okay, I have to stop wasting time. Staying or leaving? I'm serious, no one will stop you."

Snape's mouth flattened. "Staying."

Harry let out a noiseless sigh of relief. Now to hoping that Snape wouldn't be more trouble than he was worth. "Thank you, Professor."

:::

Mostly because none of the squads wanted Snape, and crowded into Harry's tent with urgent discretion to tell him so, Snape joined Harry's permanent entourage.

 _Entourage_ was Snape's word for it. It was small, no more than five people at a time. They moved a lot, more than any of the other squads. It had used to be that Hermione got traded out a lot, because she had skills that were urgently needed elsewhere. When Ron had started becoming very good at healing spells, he'd started being more in demand. When Harry set off, Ron rotated out of his group and Hermione rotated in, along with Kingsley Shacklesbolt. They camped somewhere in the Scottish highlands their first night, where Harry asked Snape to teach him Legilimancy.

"That's dark magic, Harry," said Hermione, from the other side of the deep blue campfire, which emitted heat but very little light.

"She's right," Snape said shortly. "I won't do it."

"Are you serious? Three people got killed last month because one of their squad members gave into blackmail and ratted on them. The day after I spoke with her. It would have been very useful to read her mind and keep some good people from dying."

Snape looked at him bitterly. "You have no idea what kind of effect it'll have on people to know you have that talent. And trust me, as a beginner, you won't be able to hide what you're doing. You'll have mass desertion."

Harry clenched his jaw, arguments bubbling up in his head.

"That's why I should do it."

"He's right," said Kingsley. "Dumbledore had a routine with Snape that you can inherit. Purport to trust him, which you in fact do. Apologize for using him for distasteful purposes. Never be seen to be taking his advice, or treating him as anything other than a tool in a large set of them. Distance yourself from him, or punish him in some visible way, when people become hostile to how he's deployed. When they forget, draw him back, and frame it as an act of magnanimity."

This was the first time Harry had ever seen Snape look alarmed. "I wouldn't quite put it," he said, and stopped. His cheeks were blotchy.

"I would never say that outside the command circle," Kingsley said severely. "And I wouldn't go about repeating that, either. But it's a strategy that works."

Harry felt sick. "I won't do it. And I don't believe –"

"That Dumbledore did it?" Hermione's voice was small. "I think he did, Harry. You can describe it in other ways, but Kingsley's description isn't false."

Kingsley and Hermione were watching Harry, and Harry was watching Snape. Snape was staring into the fire. He said, "To the extent that this is true, I signed off on it. If anything, the Headmaster did this on my encouragement."

The sick feeling in Harry's stomach grew. "Professor, can I speak to you alone?"

His apprehension did not decrease when Snape acquiesced without comment. They went into Harry's tent. The wards built into the polyester kept sound in but not out. Snape said, "I hope you aren't going to be ridiculous about this."

"No," Harry said. He paused. "Listen. You kissed me three nights ago."

He'd been afraid of an explosion – denial, ridicule – but Snape said nothing. His face was a mask. Harry tried to place where he'd seen it before, and with a jolt remembered: the handful of dreams he'd had before he'd learned to block out Voldemort. This was the face Snape wore for the Dark Lord.

He reached for Snape's hand and remembered just in time that it was the injured one. Snape flinched briefly. "Potter, don't make this farcical. If I did, it was a mistake. Put it behind you. Unless you want reparation for the insult?"

"I wasn't insulted. Is that what you want? To put it behind you?"

Harry hadn't been aware of how much he'd been hoping the answer had been no until Snape said, with savage conviction, "Yes."

He felt himself nodding mechanically. "Okay, then. Good to – get that clear."

They stared at each other.

"There is only one conclusion you can say you reached when you walk out of this tent. Use me. Dumbledore set a good strategic precedent – I can think of none better, in fact, that maximizes morale and utility." Snape's tone turned vicious, slicing. "You have to do it, Potter, if you care about winning more than your precious ethics. Unless you're enough of a puling adolescent that you want to be nice to anyone who'll snog you?"

Harry physically took a step back. "I care about winning."

Snape's good hand shot out and grabbed his shoulder, digging right into the bruise from the last time he'd done it. Harry winced. " _THEN ACT LIKE IT!"_ Spittle flew into his face.

Harry wiped it off with his sleeve, breathless with rage, glaring back into Snape's pitchblende eyes. He couldn't believe he had to be the adult in the room. "I care about winning. That means I take seriously all the ways in which I might win. You tell me that treating you like garbage is the only way to victory? I'll bloody well take that into consideration, Snape. But that doesn't mean I'll do it."

:::

Snape fed them information that had been current as of his defection. Much of it was useless – Voldemort would have yanked around what he could, making the information unactionable. In fact, there was an effective cessation in Death Eater activity for a week, as safehouses were moved, passwords changed, wards refreshed, missions recalled or reassigned. The resistance made an impressive number of minor raids, recovering gold, supplies, and in one case, several hostages.

Harry's team took advantage of the lull. [... Gain something of an advantage, making a lot of hard and fast strikes for the next while]

[During one of those strikes, Harry is downed by enemy fire]

"Shite!" Snape swore, skidding into the [alley?] and getting to his knees. He let out a string of profanity Harry had never heard from anyone and took out his wand. "I'll fucking kill you if you die, Potter."

"But you," Harry started to say, slurring. He felt his throat throb ominously when he spoke. _But you can't use your wand hand._

"Don't fucking talk, you idiot," Snape barked out. His hand was shaking. Sparks flew out of the end of his wand. He switched hands and gabbled out an incantation. Harry had never heard Snape's voice shake before. He felt something yank at his flesh and groaned in remote horror at the feeling of it. Snape switched back to his dominant hand and repeated the incantation, to no effect. Then again. Then again.

Then again.

Then again, with a hitch in the voice.

Then again.

"Not _you_ ," Snape said. The raw despair in his voice was hard to endure hearing.

Then again.

Then again, then again –

Fire bloomed through his body. Harry screamed, a gurgling noise that transitioned into a real, hoarse yell. His neck and shoulder had knit itself together. He ached all over.

Snape lowered his head onto Harry's chest for a moment. "Fuck," he said. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

"Hey," Harry said weakly, weaving his hand into Snape's lank hair, stroking his scalp with his fingertips. "I'm alive."

Snape turned his face to press his cheek into Harry's palm. Lashes fluttering shut tickled. Two hard exhales against Harry's wrist. Then he rocked back onto his heels, looking stony. "Get up. We have to go."

Harry stood up and looked down where he'd been lying. There was a truly astonishing amount of blood. He was covered in it. It had gotten on Snape's robes, too. His vision spun. "Where?"

"Welsh safehold," Snape said shortly, yanking Harry close. "Portkey."

"They might have gotten it too."

"We have no choice."

They were spinning through space. It was too much – Harry blacked out. He came to when he hit the ground. Snape was on his knees, gray with pain. The Portkey clattered onto the wet grass.

Mist rolled past them and down the hill. The steps to the safehouse were right in front of them. Harry uncrossed his eyes and focused on the shimmering wards. "Microbrewery, bioluminescence, longitude," he husked out. Hermione had taken to assigning Muggle passcodes to the safehouse wards. The wards shimmered and made a space for him. "Come on, Snape."

They managed to stand up, leaning against each other, and staggered up the stairs. The doors opened for them into a facility stripped down like a warehouse. There were medical beds lining one wall, and showers lining the other. A tub full of meals under stasis spells, under a portrait of an owl.

Harry stabbed a finger at the medical beds. "Go."

Snape glared at him weakly but obeyed. Harry stumbled over to the owl portrait. He almost nicked his thumb open for blood before remembering he had plenty of it on his robe and skin. He clumsily smeared it against the portrait frame and repeated some code words.

The owl flew out. "I'm messenger Pallas. Do you have a message?" it said, in Hermione's voice.

"I'm in the Pallas safehouse with Snape," said Harry. "Neither of us wounded badly, but assistance appreciated. Next steps unknown, we'll move out in three days if we're threatened or don't get word."

"Are you capable of verifying your identity with a Patronus?" it said in Hermione's brisk cool voice.

"Yes, I think," said Harry. He had to give it three tries before the silver stag unfolded from his wand. It tossed its antlers back and cantered around him, showing off a little. Harry regarded it fondly, and then caught sight of Snape, who was watching him from across the safehouse with an unreadable expression.

"Verified," said the owl, and flew away. Harry put the portrait back on the wall and limped over to Snape.

He was wary that Snape might say something biting about his Patronus and start a fight Harry had no energy for, but Snape said nothing. His face was tight with pain.

"Your arm," Harry said.

The spell had given. The dead parts of Snape's arm were still a crumbling gray. The healthy skin around it was a painful red.

"Lie down. You're... blood loss," said Snape. He wasn't in great shape either.

The medical beds were designed to accommodate people much larger than Snape. It could fit two skinny people. Harry clambered up on Snape's right side and pressed his body against him, laying his throbbing head on the pillow. His nose was an inch away from Snape's ear.

"Potter."

"You're warm."

"You presume too much."

Harry didn't respond. He lay there, sleepily thinking. And then he said, "There's no live flesh left to serve as a channel. You must have pushed your magic through the bone."

"Yes." Snape sounded surprised. "That's what I did."

Harry put his hand on Snape's chest, slipping it under the opening of his robe to lie over the heart. Snape was skinny enough that he could feel it beating. "That's seems like a terrible idea. Don't do that again."

Snape's breath hitched when Harry's breath passed over his ear. "What are you doing?"

"Falling asleep. You'll have to be the one who moves if you don't like it." Then Harry fell unconscious.

:::

Harry felt well when he woke up. It was dawn. The sky was a pale gray through the high windows. Snape was still next to him, fast asleep. His face was lined and pallid in sleep.

Harry filled two large glasses with water and came back to the bed to stare bleakly at his Potions professor. It occurred to him that there was a good chance this might be the most romantic thing he ever experienced before he died. Pondering that for more than a few seconds made him chuckle.

That roused Snape. "What?" he said crankily, before he came fully awake. "Ah. Wales. And you almost died."

"Have some water," Harry said, passing him a glass. "It would be best if you drank all of it."

Snape drank half of it, and grudgingly. "Any word from Granger?"

"No. I sent her an owl saying we'd move in three days if we heard nothing."

Snape nodded. He wasn't meeting Harry's eyes.

Harry said, "You know I want to sleep with you, right?"

A long pause, Snape's face utterly immobile. "Potter. Do you need me to point out why this is foolish in the extreme?"

"I can figure it out," Harry said. "Let's skip it. No one has to know. I've never sucked anyone's cock before and I'd rather not die before I ever try it."

"Wait two days and you'll find a better opportunity," said Snape unpleasantly, as if this reflected badly on Harry.

"I don't want another opportunity."

"I need to piss."

"Loo's right there," Harry said. He was suddenly breathless.

Snape must have washed his cock after pissing, because it was damp and cold when he settled back on the bed and Harry pulled it out of his trousers. It was surprisingly heavy, soft, larger than Harry's own. The foreskin was puckered around the cockhead, soft and dusky. Harry stared at it, marveling.

"Throw in the towel or get it on with."

"Shut up and give me a second," Harry said, rubbing gently at the shaft, working his nerve up. "Sir."

He put his mouth around it. It was... round. Big in his mouth. Satisfyingly big. When he sucked, the flesh jerked in his hand and hardened noticeably.

Everything was easy after that. Harry put as much of Snape's cock in his mouth as would fit, burying his nose right up against the dark thatch of pubic hair between Snape's legs, laving the flesh with his tongue. He could hear Snape stifling moans. After a few minutes, Snape's hand settled tentatively in his hair.

Harry pulled off to say, wetly, "You can grab harder than that, if you want, and move me. Just don't choke me."

Snape's gaze was glassy, fixed on Harry's mouth. He didn't say a word. His grip on Harry's hair tightened to the point of pain, and then he maneuvered Harry's face down to face his crotch again as he pumped up into his mouth.

When Snape came, his hips slammed up, grinding his cock right up against the back of Harry's throat. Harry gagged and tried to swallow, and did, some. The rest dripped back out of his mouth into a dilute, sticky pool at the fork of Snape's body. He pulled off and dragged his sleeve across his sour-tasting mouth, panting.

Snape was staring at him, wild-eyed, breathing hard. "Christ," he said. Harry had never heard him use a Muggle swear before.

Harry reached for a towel and wiped at his face, discreetly spitting into it. Snape's semen was bitter, almost acrid. He almost said something inane like, _that was nice_. And it had been. But he was keyed into the tension running through Snape's frame – the cornered way he was looking at Harry.

Harry brought down the towel to wipe at Snape's crotch, careful and gentle, and then did the buttons of Snape's trousers again. Snape didn't say a word.

Fucking hell. He'd just done a sex thing with Snape. Snape, who was twice his age, who'd hated his father... He flipped it around and thought of it from the other end: 'I just slept with Potter – Potter, the underage figurehead of the resistance against my old master, son and spitting image of the classmate who made my school years hell.'

It flashed into his head like a mantra: A scared Snape was a dangerous Snape.

"Save it," he said, in a casual is-there-more-to-talk-about voice.

Snape hunched his shoulders pissily. "I didn't say anything, Potter."

[they have sex two more times, and the next day they're rescued]

:::

Sex with men, Harry thought, should have been something he discovered with exhilaration, something that should have consumed weeks of his life in school. Maybe a whole semester. And it was exciting, that wasn't wrong. He rather thought it was exciting for Snape too, for all he looked like a spooked horse when Harry got remotely familiar with him in front of everyone else. Harry took the hint and became standoffish, which Kingsley at least approved of. But when he got Snape alone, he went all shuddery and eager under Harry's hands.

But it was, truth be told, an indulgence quickly folded away when other things took priority, which they all too often did. Harry was a teenager, but he was also hungry and sleep-deprived and busy with fighting for his life. Half the time they got a chance for time together, he was too tired to do anything other than set an alarm and climb into bed for a nap with Snape. (Napping with Snape!) Climb into bed and drift off with Snape's head on his arm, Snape's arm settling tentatively around his waist. And often when they got their pants off, which was about once a week, he was preoccupied enough with the rest of his life that he couldn't get into it enough to come.

Snape came even less frequently. Harry thought it might be the arm – Snape was almost always in pain. Harry enjoyed – no, he loved – wrapping his hand or mouth around Snape's cock and looking up to see the lines of pain on his face melted away.

:::

[They win the war; Snape lies to Harry in one major way to get him in the right headspace, or get him to go to the key location, or something, to his own cost. They meet afterwards – Harry comes by to St. Mungo's, where Snape is finally getting advanced care for his arms, and chews him out. He also brought roses.]

[They skip pretty immediately to being kind of a married couple, to everyone's utter horror, but who's going to say anything?]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you enjoy Snape whump, considering checking out my completed "five times someone sees (and sometimes, mistreats) intersex Snape naked" fic, which comes with the obvious warnings: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25942168


End file.
